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UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

282 points by blkhp19 12y ago

hit8run 12y ago
That's also what I experienced. Yosemite UI Performance is super slow compared to Mavericks. Maybe by rewriting the UI Code they also got rid of speed optimizations from the Bertrand Serlet era :/
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  Turning off transparency in the Accessibility preferences fixed it for me.
  - unicornporn 12y ago
    And now you get the funny black corners in the hud when changing the volume... Polish is needed.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  Funny you mention that. I interned at Upthere last summer and got to know Bertrand a bit. We had some good conversations about the NeXT days. I wish I was still there now so I could talk to him about this. I'm sure he has some interesting input since he knows the software inside and out.
bluthru 12y ago
Just checked on my 2007 MBP--I'm also getting flashes. (Translucency is turned off.)
cmelbye 12y ago
It's probably too much to hope for a stability and performance focus for iOS 9 and OS X 10.11, but damn if I don't try.
comex 12y ago
Interesting. The flashing at least seems to be an isolated System Preferences bug, as I don't remember seeing it in any other applications. Would be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air in an area typically so subjective and dominated by perceptual biases.
- mikhailt 12y ago
  Not only that, it only flashes in certain areas of Sys Prefs. For me, I see flashes only in General, Security & Privacy and so on. It looks fine in Dock, Mission Control and so on. I think it is just a bug in certain layouts.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  Tiger didn't have Mission Control, but I certainly think there are other tests that could be done that really compare all aspects of the OS. I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.
  - alexqgb 12y ago
    Dashboard has become virtually unusable in Yosemite. "Laggy" is an understatement. If I'm activating it after a restart, it can take a full minute for the widgets to become active. The same selection is available instantly in Snow Leopard. Thank goodness I've got a partitioned drive, and can switch back and forth between Y and SL as needed.
  - comex 12y ago
    Tiger had Exposé, which is close enough.
  - astrange 12y ago
    The "free RAM" statistic is meaningless. Are any applications in particular using lots of private memory?
joshmn 12y ago
I don't know anything of desktop/native applications, but web. My question to the people on the other side of the isle: why aren't all the view panes preloaded, and pre-rendered? In this day and age, where 64mb of RAM is easy to come by, I don't see (as a web developer) why this approach isn't taken.
- krakensden 12y ago
  You're only counting the application you're looking at though. Multiply that by all the applications running, and pretty soon 512MB of VRAM is looking kinda skimpy. And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a huge amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.
  - blkhp19 12y ago
    It's also worth noting that drawing UI elements is relatively inexpensive.
- jpttsn 12y ago
  System preferences doesn't do this for security reasons.
mikhailt 12y ago
I wish SL were still getting updates, it was the best OS release Apple ever made. It went downhill the moment they went to annual release cycles. I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.
- acomjean 12y ago
  I agree. I stuck with Snow Leopard as long as I could (enough software was no longer compatible). No other mac OS in my experience was as stable (I've been using system macos 7) I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates. My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.
- sgustard 12y ago
  Agreed. SL was released under unique circumstances: most engineers were working on the first version of iOS, and the remaining core OS folks had free reign to improve the architecture without management pressure to add features.
conradev 12y ago
Even with "Reduce Transparency" enabled (blur disabled) I've had times when Mission Control operates at 2 frames per second on my 13" 2013 rMBP. This never happened using Mavericks. If you try full screen zoom on Yosemite with an external display attached, it's similarly unusable.
- imkevinxu 12y ago
  This. I love the full screen zoom but had to turn it off for my thunderbolt display. Also I had a hot corner for Mission Control that was similarly laggy, had to turn that off too :(
  - petarb 12y ago
    the zoom with a thunderbolt display attached is unbearable! I really hope they fix the jankiness
- jbinto 12y ago
  It's good to see this get some attention. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make full screen zoom usable with an external display. I found if you enable the "Increase Contrast" accessibility feature, performance is improved, but it does negatively affect aesthetics. I answered my own question about this on Apple StackExchange here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/157118/70049 http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/157118/70049
- sickmate 12y ago
  This is one of the clear areas where performance is nowhere near previous versions. One solution is to switch to the "Picture-in-picture" zoom style under the Accessibility preferences.
- mindajar 12y ago
  Yeah, regardless of transparency settings, WindowServer seems to get really slow after it's been running for awhile (days? hours? it depends.) Restarting the login session or doing a full reboot seems to fix it ... for a little while. Performance goes downhill faster for me with an external display connected.
lucisferre 12y ago
Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the call. This is completely unacceptable behavior and a feature like this should have never been released unless it was exceptionally reliable and seamless. It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore. One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  The phone thing was infuriating. After upgrading all of a sudden every device I own would start ringing like crazy: phone, computer, Apple TV STOPS airplay because the iPad streaming to it was also buzzing like mad. I KNOW I KNOW, you can turn it off, but I hate the fact that upgrading my OS has now become "turn off the 10 gimmick features so you can get back to some level of sanity", especially because after I pick up the call I completely forget about it (I'm not going to not take the call and then start going through the prefs on my x devices). So the other day I finally gave in and just hit accept on my computer -- and ... call failed. Great. I felt like I was on candid camera or something, the employees at Apple viewing me through my iSight camera on my monitor laughing at the sucker who finally took the bait. As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.
blkhp19 12y ago
For those who haven't read the video description: Here's a very quick, unscientific comparison of one tiny aspect of UI performance in OS X Yosemite vs. OS X Tiger. Although this is just one example, I personally see these kinds of hiccups throughout OS X constantly. The machine running OS X Tiger is actually an Intel Core 2 Duo PC (hackintosh) from 2007 with no hardware accelerated graphics support in OS X (it's an unsupported intel integrated graphics chipset that was never used in a real mac, hence the unsupported graphics). Therefore, the Tiger demo is running without QE and CI. The machine running OS X Yosemite is a late 2013 15 inch retina MBP. Automatic graphics switching is disabled for the demo, forcing the machine to use the much more powerful Nvidia graphics card. I also have the power adapter plugged in so that the system isn't in a low power state. I've been using OS X for 8 years now. From 2007 to 2013, I used hackintoshes (custom built with compatible hardware). Those machines ran Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I got my rMBP in 2013 and it's now my primary machine. It first ran Mavericks, then I upgraded it to Yosemite this year. It's been my experience that the performance of all of my machines has noticeably declined since the release of Lion. In terms of UI performance, my rMBP running Mavericks/Yosemite is nowhere near as responsive as any of my Snow Leopard machines were. Fingers crossed that WWDC 2014 focusses on major speed and stability improvements for OS X and iOS. New features are great, but not at the cost of performance.
mrmondo 12y ago
was heavily involved in the beta testing of 10.10, In my experience Yosemite is by far not only the most buggy, but also slowest release of OSX. I am saddened to report that only one of the many performance regressions I reported was actually fixed (In that case within Mail.app). A huge portion of the performance problems seem to be stemming from the graphics subsystem. If you use Yosemite on dual Retina or even WQHD displays you'll know what I'm talking about. Add graphics glitches, immature theming and wireless problems to the over all poor performance and were talking about major issues in areas that OSX has been known as a leader in. My biggest issue is that Apple seems to be ignoring most of the core performance issues that are being reported - just look at the number of unresolved posts on the Apple forums. I do hope that Tim Cook is becoming aware of the drop in reputation that OSX has received since Yosemite and is leading his teams to perform more in depth performance soak testing before releases in the future.
- kayoone 12y ago
  Its especially bad on the 13" rMBP which has a relatively weak GPU. When using scaled resolutions the UI lag is very noticeable, i also get some redrawing issues of icons. You can improve the situation by disabling transparency effects, but that produces some graphical glitches. In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well. Current GPUs in the Macbooks are just not ready to handle the massive resolutions used for scaling. Just try to run a 60fps youtube video in a scaled resolution and you will see your system load go up to the point the video might even stutter.
  - carlob 12y ago
    > In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well. I don't think that 1680x1050 is native or even half-native on the 13. IIRC the Air is 1440x900 and the 13 rmbp is less than that (when you count the points). This is why I keep telling people who want a 13' Mac to get the air, but sadly very few listen…
fiatpandas 12y ago
You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them: "look, this accelerated release cycle, it's not resulting in quality software. It's hurting our reputation. It's not performing on 2 year old hardware. People are losing faith in our ability to release stable bug-free builds. Users shouldn't have to cross their fingers when upgrading. This is Apple." But no, that's probably not happening.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  I don't even understand who they're competing with by doing yearly updates. It's probably a big scramble to get features released and for what? To beat Windows 8? To beat linux? They don't have any threats when it comes to desktop operating systems, so they should slow down and make some quality updates.
  - grandalf 12y ago
    It keeps the size of each update much smaller and less error-prone. Each update contains a few significant changes and lots of minor ones. It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons: - it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis - it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem - it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world. - it lets the actual periodic security updates be used only for critical fixes. Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware. - Apple's biggest strength is attention to UX details. Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data. None of this excuses buggy releases, but overall it's significantly less buggy than any similarly ambitious OS out there.
    - pervycreeper 12y ago
      >it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception >it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can >Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data. They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.
mrpippy 12y ago
I've also had lots of problems with Yosemite, but I don't think this comparison is useful at all. The Hackintosh looks like a fresh install with nothing else running, whereas the rMBP has other apps running. When I don't have 100+ Safari tabs open, Yosemite runs a lot better.
- afro88 12y ago
  My late 2014 rMBP 15" performs just like the video, and with nothing else running. It's the only thing that's disappointed me with my purchase - their flagship laptop (well, 2nd from the top, I have the 2.2GHz) should run the OS silky smooth. Like my 2010 MBP did when I bought it in 2010.
- lstamour 12y ago
  The graphical glitches that he notes however, happen even on a powerful, plugged-in 15" retina model. I just tried it myself. Some parts of each screen, including the blue (or grey) themed UI elements for tabs or dropdowns, take longer to move to a selected state. It's unclear whether the delay is due to the time it takes to load the preferences for the screen -- that it can't do so before you click -- or if the graphics themselves take that long to draw but already know what state they should be in. It's funny, I knew something had changed, but I couldn't pin-point it until this video. Until the side-by-side, I figured the glitches were a side-effect from it being "too fast" since there's no transition animation. But it's obvious the animated version simply felt smoother and more integrated as a UI.
tolmasky 12y ago
Animation in general is just plain broken in Yosemite (and iOS 8). I'm not up to date with the latest frameworks, but I believe there's been a fundamental API change, because its basically possible to break any animation by just causing an event to happen before its finished. This happens all the time in iOS, you can get it to break mid-rotation and end up in a half and half state: https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672 https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672 On OS X, its the same thing. Here's me easily repro-ing in Safari: http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation.mov http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation...
lunixbochs 12y ago
I feel like the entire compositor has a performance regression. This includes dragging windows, and seems to have nothing to do with transparency. When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools). I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and typing. I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps. A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings. [1] https://developer.apple.com/downloads/ https://developer.apple.com/downloads/
- r109 12y ago
  I use BeamSyncDropper v2 and have it open on startup. The only downsize is it takes a bit for the terminal window to load and execute the shell script. If you have an SSD this shouldn't be a problem, just be patient for that 2-3 seconds of painstaking peasantry. xD Download and discussion about BeamSyncDropper can be found here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/customization/92201-beamsyncdropper-tool-disable-beamsync-permanently.html http://www.tonymacx86.com/customization/92201-beamsyncdroppe... Also one thing about OS X running in VMWare is make sure you're using the specific CPU to the fullest potential. Graphics are rendered with the use of CPU. If you don't have the processor(s) / cores set properly you could be only at 50% overall performance. For example, I am currently using an i3 330UM. I've noticed a significant jump in performance switching from single processor 2 cores; to 2 processors 4 cores. Personally, Mavericks outperformed Yosemite on this little machine. I've experienced long window load times, hangs, and even guest crashes since the jump... My main desktop workstation is rocking an i7-930; I WILL NOT upgrade my main VMWare workstation to Yosemite. If I need to I will just clone my current VMWare image and run Mavericks / Yosemite in tandem. I would much prefer Mavericks > Yosemite...
  - 12y ago
kenferry 12y ago
This particular issue is probably due to process isolation and sandboxing. In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported. In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process. That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.
srpoder 12y ago
This is simply sad. I downgraded to Mavericks after a week of pain with Yosemite, I won't upgrade again, I don't trust it anymore.
grandalf 12y ago
Not sure what everyone is talking about, I loaded Yosemite on my 3 macbooks (2010 11" air, 2011 13" air, and 2014 13" pro) and it works perfectly on all with no glitching whatsoever.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Could be a retina thing. I see it on my MBPr 15 2013.
  - qubitcoder 12y ago
    Same here with the MBPr 15" 2012. I recommend a clean install of Yosemite. After upgrading from the beta versions to the final release, I still had UI elements misplaced (e.g. the address bar in Safari was 1/3 the width and stuck on the left edge). A clean install fixed the UI alignment and some other minor quirks. I still notice occasional black squares in Safari which cover a portion of the screen; a page refresh seems to resolve the issue. But Firefox developer edition, on the other hand, is snappy and responsive.
  - grandalf 12y ago
    my MBP is a MBPr
ps4fanboy 12y ago
I wonder if this was done on the latest apple hardware. Apple always appears to regress older hardware without fail.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- fleitz 12y ago
  Yes, generally people want OSs to do more, not operate faster. Therefore most of the time the performance benefits are eaten by additional software. It's most apparent on older hardware that was already running close to max capacity.
mproud 12y ago
Yosemite uses a variation of a cross-dissolve transition when changing/showing content after a mouse click, whereas older versions do not. Give it a try and pay close attention to the window.
tomvo 12y ago
I noticed a lot of UI speed degradation as well, especially when using a dual monitor setup and changing focus from one screen to the other. This was the most visible when OSX tries to refresh the menubar icons. I did a fresh install (instead of upgrade to the beta) and things seem to be a little better but I guess this just has to do with the fresh install clearing my mac of all the bloat that it acquired in the past years.
mergy 12y ago
The decline started with Lion. Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of the OS. They were able to offset or mask some of this with SSD drives. But, it has become pretty sloppy for folks that really wanted to tune their systems for performance. Couple that with the questionable changes on the UI over the last couple major releases and I didn't see anything I wanted anymore.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Lion was also the OS where they started cutting out core functionality (e.g. the ACPI controller) from their open source releases.
- yourad_io 12y ago
  > Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of the OS. A thousand times this. I stuck it out with 10.6 for the longest time. Eventually, "people" stopped bothering to release for 10.6 (Java 7... :/) and Apple lost me as a customer. Which was a blessing in disguise - I'm very happy with Ubuntu + i3 and wouldn't go back even if they got their shit together.
- seanalltogether 12y ago
  Adium still lists 14% of their users on Snow Leopard. https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion It's painful to support these days but I'm still trying keep my apps compatible with it.
  - zacwest 12y ago
    Adium has had a huge decline in users, though, since then, so the percentage isn't as informative. For example, if you look back to a couple years ago, we had ~180k stats pings for the same week period[1] as we do now at ~20k[2]. I think what you're seeing/reporting here is that users who still use Adium are not entirely upgrading. That's probably true, but has more to do with Messages.app in newer versions supporting iMessage than anything else. (I was one of the Adium developers for years. I don't even use it anymore because of the prevalence of iMessage and the decline in general IM.) [1]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar [2]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar
sesteel 12y ago
I am currently working on an OpenGL based UI toolkit and recently purchased a 4K monitor and a EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti to drive the display for testing purposes. As you might expect, it appears taxing to push 4X the content over the bus or have the card render content at a high resolution. This may not be the effect seen here, but it is the first thing that came to mind. I am not sure how well system hardware has kept up with display technology.
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  Not strictly resolution dependant. The same problem is present on current model macbook airs and non-retina imacs.
x0054 12y ago
I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow. After 3 days with Yosemite I had to use my wife's 2009 Air for something, it's running Mavericks, and wow, the speed! That day I restored from a backup and now I am back to running 10.9. My battery is back to 6+ hours, and my laptop is flying. I also updated my iPad 3 from iOS 6 to iOS 8. Now it's unusable! So, so, so slow. And that I can't even downgrade. If you are going to screw things up, Apple, can you at least give me an option to downgrade. I think the main problem is the monolithic aspect of the OSX and iOS. Why is the Mail or Face Time app part of the OS?
- coldtea 12y ago
  >I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow. Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up. Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain? Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?
  - x0054 12y ago
    >Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain? >Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case? Yes, I did perform basic investigation. I switched from Chrome to Safari, because Chrome was eating battery like crazy. I shut down anything that I wasn't using. Browsing the internet on Safari I was getting 3.5 hours on a charge. I even timed it! And I am not the only one, read the Apple forums complaining about this. I even reset the PRAM, as Apple recommends. It didn't help. Now I am running a lot more apps, using Chrome, compiling stuff in the background, and still getting my usual 5.5-6.5 hours of battery life (depending on the load). So, yes, I did spent over 20 hours of my life trying to make Yosemite work, and then gave up and switched back to Mavericks. I had a CC backup, so it only took 20 minutes. >Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up. Also, I didn't not mention anything about memory usage, but you are right, the memory footprint was lower. About 1.6gb on average, vs 2.6gb with Mavericks. But I don't care about that, I have 16gb, so I have RAM to spare. On the other hand, I can use all the battery life I can get. Apple does some amazing things, and some really bad things. It's important to give them due credit for the mazing things, and call them out on the crap that they put out as well. Yosemite is very slick looking and a very pretty operating system. But it is very buggy, and what Apple put out as a GM release is beta quality at best.
msie 12y ago
Wow, the day I finally upgrade to Yosemite this story and its comments arrive. Hours too late. :-(
mholt 12y ago
Interesting that this was the UI aspect that was chosen for a video. In my experience, Yosemite performed very poorly when clicking on a folder from the dock (very low framerate). My problems were worse than bad UI though, I was losing data. Yosemite frequently (every other day) crashed hard-core and the only option was to power cycle. Though I save frequently, sometimes I just hadn't hit Cmd+S yet, and in some running processes, it corrupted data. (On a Late 2013 MBP.) Reverting to Mavericks made everything silky smooth again. Not a single crash or performance hiccup. I think I'll stay here for a while.
mukundmr 12y ago
Performance has degraded with Yosemite. Stability is not an issue. I use it on both older and newer machines.
x0054 12y ago
Also, this is part of the final build? https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7o6JO6e_TWQ.png https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7... Really, this bug was reported in the original beta, 6 months ago!
- unfunco 12y ago
  I think that only happens when UI transparency is disabled. I don't have the same issue[0]. I find Yosemite to be fine with a few exceptions, Safari is not as fast as I'd like it to be, and I've had issues when attempting to answer the phone on my laptop. I think Apple needs a Snow Yosemite, where they focus on fixes and performance with minimal new features. [0]: http://imgur.com/KIIbsfr http://imgur.com/KIIbsfr
  - x0054 12y ago
    Yes, it only appears in "reduced transparency" mode, but that's no excuse. Again, this is a well reported bug that many people have noticed 6 months ago and it would take an Apple intern 20 minutes (maybe an hour if they were very inapt) to locate and fix the issue. It's just not a priority to them. I really wish that they would switch to a 2 year OS release cycle, and work harder on stability of the core OS. They can pull Messenger, Mail, Facetime, and all the other apps out of the OS package, and add features to those all they want, but I want the core OS to be stable.
- bastih 12y ago
  Looks like this bug is fixed in 10.10.2 for me.
gcb0 12y ago
jobs died in the middle of his plan of covering osx and ios and forever owning apple consumers. now crook is executing it without the reality distortion powers that jobs had.
tdicola 12y ago
Have been holding off on upgrading to Yosemite until the dust settles. I find it funny that I'm not even getting nagged at all to upgrade (unlike on iOS where I was getting nagged constantly to upgrade to iOS 8). It's almost like Apple themselves aren't even confident enough in Yosemite to be usable right now.
Yoshino 12y ago
I do agree that Yosemite has had some performance regressions, but people seem to remember the older operating systems with rose colored glasses. I used 10.3 to 10.5 on the 2005 PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz) and it was incredibly slow. Spotlight was nearly useless. The fans would frequently spin up. And let's not talk about Finder locking up when a network mount disappeared. Right now I use 10.10 on the original 2012 Retina MBP, and even though Yosemite is a bit slower than Mavericks it is still leagues faster than (Mountain) Lion on the same machine (which is what it shipped with). The biggest performance regressions I've seen have been in Safari, but Chrome doesn't seem to have the same problems. I think they are paying attention, since 10.10 performance has improved considerably since the first DP, but they need to do more. I wish they would stop fucking with it on a yearly cycle and just release a stable, fast operating system with no new features. The graphics system needs more optimization and they need to kill HFS+ (but that's a whole different can of worms). (Edits: wording)
mayhaffs 12y ago
While loitering in the local Apple store, I got on a new 5k iMac and started launching a bunch of applications with multiple windows, alt-tabbing and clicking around really fast, etc. Normal dev workflow stuff.. Discovering the glitchy flash in the system preferences pane was really unsettling. Almost a uncanny valley type situation. I'm still on Mavericks. I've been waiting for bug fixes from Apple and application support for non-Apple apps before upgrading to Yosemite. But after seeing the glitchy-ness on the 5k and reading these comments.. Both recent upgrades are pretty disappointing. When I first got an iPhone 4, I was astonished by how there were practically zero bugs, especially compared to my previous no-name OS, bug-infested phones. Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite/iOS8? And if so, can we identify potential factors? Technical challenges shifting to Swift? Regular product life cycle growing pains? Decreased focus on OSs from Apple Increased product-lines/technologies? Pivot from price-skimming to market-capture business strategy?
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite/iOS8? And if so, can we identify potential factors? No. There are some bugs and some glitches, like in every release. Nothing to write home about, except from a small percentage of the population with a Mac from a faulty production run (but that's hardware, not the OS), or with some software that's hogging the cpu (but that's the software, not the OS). I have this flashing in System Prefs -- it's a small annoyance, but nothing especially interesting or getting in the way. There are 2-3 more bugs. And some things introduced I was there from OS X 10.2. People have complained for every single OS X release...
  - fleitz 12y ago
    Haha 10.2, yeah in 10.2 you were lucky if you could get something working after 30 minutes in bash.
- oldspiceman 12y ago
  Discovering the glitchy flash in the system preferences pane was really unsettling. Almost a uncanny valley type situation. I need to see a video of this moment.
rmetzler 12y ago
Not really sure what causes this, but I learned that Apple changed the layouting algorithm to Cassowary a few years ago [1]. Because languages have different word length (eg. German words tend to be much longer than English words) and UIs should be readable in every language. Apple now uses constraints to layout the UI and the algorithm tries to find a good solution through iteration and has to reiterate for every size change. Visual effect might also trigger this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_%28software%29
- carlosrg 12y ago
  Mmm, that could be one of the causes. Definitely something changed after Lion.
- zw 12y ago
  As someone who has used it extensively, Auto Layout is not a cause for performance UI regressions. Not by a long shot.
batuhanicoz 12y ago
I did have many of the issues commented here but recent beta releases fixed many of them for me. Wifi seems stable, I can answer phone calls if the phone is nearby, it certainly become faster over time. I'm on a previous generation rMBP 13".
JohnBooty 12y ago
I hadn't noticed any perceptible performance differences in Yosemite on my 2011 MBP. After reading this article, I opened up System Preferences on an external WQHD monitor and... yes, indeed. That transition is not very smooth. Informally, it doesn't seem slower ...it's just not as smooth as the old effect. As another poster noted, in Yosemite those panels now use a cross-dissolve effect instead the simpler slide and fade in earlier versions of OSX. Thing is, I'm not sure I would have noticed this in a million years. How much time do you guys spend clicking around in System Preferences every day? This really affects you? I don't know of any other apps with preference panes that use this effect. I tried two other apps (iTunes and Pages) and neither one uses the cross dissolve. I understand that this small regression is merely emblematic of the issues some of you are experiencing; none of you are claiming that System Preferences itself has a huge impact on your daily lives. But this is such a ridiculous regression to select as the poster child for Yosemite's perceived woes.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  I totally agree the example I posted is ridiculous. Let me explain why I did it. I was a hackintosh user for years. I got an old lenovo from 2007 with an intel core 2 duo and thought it would be fun to install OS X Tiger on it. Install went smoothly except the intel integrated graphics wasn't supported. I decided to check out System Preferences to see how much had changed in all these years. I immediately noticed this perfectly smooth animation between panels. I couldn't believe it was so slow - and with no graphics driver! So I tried it on my rMBP and it was incredibly laggy. I just quickly recorded it with my phone and thought I'd show just one small part of OS X that really represents a much bigger picture of UI performance regressions.
  - kenferry 12y ago
    Hm, I don't think this is a good example if the point is to talk about general graphics slowness, because the slowness here is not due to generic graphics issues. This is slow because each pane is running in its own process and it's doing some complicated cross-process graphics stuff to get all the drawing into the same window. This changed in… maybe Lion?
  - 12y ago
kenOfYugen 12y ago
My first Apple Computer was a black MacBook 13" bought in 2007. The OS installed was Leopard and I was extremely happy with it. The experience contained quality, responsiveness, stability as well as productivity enhancements. Hadn't missed Windows and Linux at all. The experience remained perfect as the OS was gradually getting updates up to 10.6.8, the latest Snow Leopard version and the hard disk drive was changed to a solid state drive. At that time I bought a MacBook Pro 13" with an i5 processor, and was introduced to Lion. Believe it or not, I used my older MacBook more. It "felt" much more solid and responsive. Well at some point I gave it away, and was stuck with the Pro model. As the OS updates where coming along, things were expected to get only better, just like I had previously experienced. But no! I'm currently using the latest Yosemite, and hate it when I notice tiny buggy things happening.. [ for example, try to disable the transparency in accessibility features, and get clunky black corner edges around the volume box as you adjust the volume up/down ] As I became a more experienced programmer, I realized that good software is perfect software. Thus anything I notice that's not right (and doesn't get fixed when it's a known issue) is a hint for a lot more bugs that I might never get to experience. So essentially I feel like I've lost the stability and security feelings that used to keep me close to the Mac OS. I really miss Snow Leopard, and hate the path Apple is following. I could bitch about their phones too but that would be more derailing. PS: I wish there was an image out there of Mac OS 10.6.8 I haven't got a spare Apple machine to boot 10.6.7, update it to 10.6.8 and create a bootable disk for my MacBook Pro Does anyone know if such an image exist, or perhaps can create it?
htilonom 12y ago
It's that fucking applegraphicspowermanagement.kext !! I'm not even kidding with that kext name. If you delete the kext, repair caches and reboot you'll see 10x better and smoother animations. More about kext itself; it contains the list of supported graphics cards (poor one) and power states for them. Some states are badly done even with supported graphics cards. I had a lot fun with this kext back in the ole' days after Intel switch.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  Can you provide a source / more information on this solution? Surely there are drawbacks. And you mention using this solution back in the day - are you sure it's still applicable?
  - htilonom 12y ago
    This is coming from Hackintosh scene, but I've had enourmous improvements on real Macs as well, which includes Macbook Pro, Air and Mac Pro (not latest gens). Easiest way is to make backup of applegraphicspowermanagement.kext or just rename it to applegraphicspowermanagement.kext.bak and then rebuild you cache with app like Kext Utility. Only drawback I see is that graphics card will now use native power management and not Mac OS one. One thing I've noticed, applegraphicspowermanagement.kext has list of graphics cards, so if your card is not identified it appears that generic power / sleep states are being used thus producing glitches. A bit more about power / sleep states. You've probably noticed that when you have certain animation first time in OS X, it is choppy, but second and third time it's animated perfectly. That's where applegraphicspowermanagement.kext is messing up the states. You can try it on Launchpad or Mission Control animations. Here's more info on the issue, it's for nvidias but it applies to every graphics cards although ATI is generally more supported on OS X. http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311 http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311 http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit-applegraphicspowermanagementkext-to-unleash-nvidias-gtx-570580-full-power-and-save-energy-at-the-same-time/ http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit-app...
gsands 12y ago
2012 MBP retina with 8gb ram here.. Major performance issues with Chrome -- when videos are playing in tabs, 10+ tabs open, etc. Systems Preferences are the least of the problems I've came across.
Luyt 12y ago
Ah, yes, the flicker and delayed drawing. I noticed that also a few years ago with Windows applications. They used to be written with the Win32 API or MFC or even VCL, but when WinForms became popular it introduced a lot of ugly flickering, especially when resizing windows with many controls on them.
aquanext 12y ago
I'm hoping that 10.11 will perhaps be the release that refines things quite a bit, concentrating on stability and generally cleaning up messes like this. Let's remember that they did a fairly major overhaul of everything with Yosemite. This is just how software works sometimes. But you're right, there was a certain amount of UI stability during the Tiger through Snow Leopard era that I wish that Apple would get back to. Try switching between the tabs in the "About this Mac" dialog. The framerate is truly shameful. Astonishing that it got approved at all. I had to try it on a couple different Macs at the Apple Store to believe that it wasn't some random problem I was seeing.
hubot 12y ago
The performance is ok for me (Air 2011).A bit slower but stable so far.
oldspiceman 12y ago
After Mavericks I swore I would wait to upgrade until the second patch of the next os. So I'm sitting here on Mavericks waiting for 10.10.2 to drop. If you slightly shift your upgrade schedule you're only 3 or 4 months behind. No big deal.
naoru 12y ago
Yeah. Just look at this menu bar when switching focus from internal Retina display to external non-Retina ATD. http://cl.ly/2W172H0l3s0z http://cl.ly/2W172H0l3s0z This bugs the hell out of me. Not so long ago I grabbed myself a G4 MDD with 768M of RAM — it was much more responsible in terms of UI. 3-4 browser tabs slowed it down though, while my current rMBP13" from 2012 works ok with a lot more.
- danbee 12y ago
  I see this ALL THE TIME. Makes me think that Apple did no testing with dual displays. I've noticed times where it's taken 2-3 seconds to settle down.
wodenokoto 12y ago
Since we all have anecdotal evidence about the merits and perils of any OS update, I find this video of another anecdote extremely counter productive to the discussion. Two systems, with different specs, different resolution and different apps running yielding different UI performance is really useless. If anyone have a spare mac and a few hours doing nothing, please re-do this experiment using fresh OSX installs on same hardware and then we actually have SOMETHING to talk about.
htor 12y ago
This video is pretty useless. Randomly clicking on settings icons on one computer with Tiger and then another with Yosemite is a poor method for comparing UI performance. Does the two computers even have the same hardware and configuration? Many people don't like the look of the new Yosemite UI. That's fine. It's a radical change. But don't make ungrounded statements about the perfomance until you have done some proper testing.
lwh 12y ago
Don't worry, in a few years when iOS gets a major 3D-look visual upgrade it will trickle down to the desktop and things will be back to normal. In the meantime I've switched my macbook to dualboot Linux and only boot up MacOS when I have to use one of the programs not available for Linux.
jokoon 12y ago
I have a mid 2009 13" mbp, and for me, it has been very slow since mavericks, probably bceause it only has 2GB of RAM and no SSD, since recent version of mac os have been optimized to use SSDs. The superdrive is busted, and there's no USB boot possible with this version. Linux or windows-bootcamp are not good options since they both seem to make the laptop ventilate like crazy. I intent to buy a 80 euros 8GB RAM upgrade, but still, it's quite sad to see such solid hardware with such crappy OS. No official way to downgrade. The processor has 3MB of L2 cache and honestly I'm sure a C++ IDE would run better on a linux-running, 300 euros, celeron laptop. I feel like I fell for the apple hype. I really feel apple is now worse than microsoft regarding screwing users. Now you can run windows 7 without a product key, and it won't really bother you too much.
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
Also, compare this with the "about this mac" dialog, the transitions are slow as hell. This would never, ever have shipped under Jobs.
ghshephard 12y ago
This isn't the first time that things have gone wrong with a new version of OS X. The shift from 10.6.8 to 10.7 was an absolute catastrophe from both a performance and a stability basis. 10.8/ML was slightly better, and, I've stayed on 10.8.5 waiting for 10.9/Mavericks to stabilize. From colleagues who use it, and the various KEXTs that I also have, it looks like Mavericks, and KEXT support for it, actually hit a pretty good stability plateau around June/July of this year - so I"m looking forward to upgrading to it sometime early in the next year. There is zero chance that I'm going to be considering 10.10/Yosemite as my production platform (if at all) any earlier than 2016. I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system. Was the older one really all that bad? About the only thing I'm missing right now is Omnifocus doesn't support 10.8 (10.9 or newer). Other than that, I can live with the various warts on 10.8.5 (particularly now that FTDI drivers don't kernel panic my system every time I pull out the USB cable) - Kernel Panics are now a biweekly (instead of every couple days)event, and my only real need to reboot the system is when my USB devices aren't recognized (usually after a sleep) - but a 3 minute reboot and everything is fine again. Still - I think it's good to call Apple on their crap - 10.6 was actually a pretty decent release, and I don't think they've managed to get one that good out since then.
- echoless 12y ago
  > I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system. The difference with this release is that it's a pretty big UI overhaul and some developer features such as storyboards for Mac aren't available on older versions. People who develop for the Mac or iOS have little choice but to upgrade. I've been running Yosemite since DP 1, and haven't had any major problems yet. There are minor annoyances, but on the whole, Yosemite's feels like a step up over Mavericks(after using it for a little while). Although I should mention that I have a pretty beefy computer with 12Gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card.
- SloopJon 12y ago
  One of the side effects of the lackluster speed bump the rMBP got for Mid 2014 is that you can get a cheaper, nearly identical Late 2013 model without Yosemite.
mzaouar 12y ago
The UI performance decline is more drastic in "System Preferences" than in the rest of the system. It's because some of the pref panes (General, Security & Privacy, etc..) are actually remote views and involve launching processes for security (address space separation) reasons.
rado 12y ago
My biggest OS X problem of 10 years – switching keyboard language – got worse in 10.10, because now it doesn't work at all in the "Share" dialog.
kaffeinecoma 12y ago
I read so many reports of Yosemite being faster that I was beginning to think I was the only one who was disappointed. I have an older machine (2010 Mac Pro tower), but it's been upgraded to 16GB RAM and an SSD over the years. I experienced an initial degradation in UI performance with Mavericks, but after the first OS update it was as fast as ever. Yosemite comes out, and now it takes over second to switch between Safari tabs on an otherwise idle machine. I had hoped that like Mavericks, this would be resolved in the first OS update, but no such luck. I enabled the "reduce transparency" option (this was recommended to speed up the UI) but it didn't help. My mid-2012 MBr doesn't seem to suffer from this. I wonder if Apple just didn't consider video cards in older hardware. Not an unreasonable thing to do, but I'd have preferred a "sorry, this machine can't run the latest OS" message instead.
alexggordon 12y ago
It's sad really. I continually have incredibly high expectations for OS X and it's new releases. However, they keep proving me wrong time and time again. I used to be incredibly "gung ho" about upgrading to Apple beta's. Then, with iOS 7, that all changed. I had to do something I've never had to. I took the beta off my phone and put back on iOS 6. Same with iOS 8 -> iOS 7, despite the nagging feeling at the back of my head that I shouldn't upgrade. I think the real issue is, that ideals like Facebook's "move fast and break things"[0] (important to note they've stopped using that technique) has become the moral of big companies to fight the decreasing return on investment each new developer brings. To compare, the impressive thing to me about Google is that they ship so fast, with so few issues. Despite Tim Cooks solid leadership, I think Apple is really in a grey area right now. Yeah, their profits are at an all time high, but the reason the profits exist is because they have the best hardware and software combination. As soon as one side of that edge goes away, then it might be prime time for a dedicated Microsoft to step back in. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/reflecting-on-3-years-at-facebook/415679363919 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/reflecti...
nuwin_tim 12y ago
The only application holding me back from using Linux on all my machines is xcode.. only if there was a wine for mac apps that could run xcode.
jorisw 12y ago
Might help to disable all those animations/transitions they keep adding. I have entered these defaults settings on all my Macs and they have sped up my experience a lot: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477/70074 http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477/70074
serve_yay 12y ago
I don't know what it is exactly, these things are very subjective, but the UI does seem to have lost some feeling of smoothness. Transitions are starker than they used to be, strange blinks as you see in this video, and more. I am not sure what to think of our current era of Apple products. The software seems to be more slapdash now, as if they are trying to do too many things at once. On the other hand, this was the first time I upgraded the OS and all my development tools worked without my wasting time on silly problems. They do seem to be more developer-friendly now, but I mean that purely in a technical sense. In terms of developer relations they are perhaps worse than ever.
general_failure 12y ago
For me the installation bombed. Just locked up forever in 1 min remaining.
- jbinto 12y ago
  It would have finished eventually. This only happens if you have a lot of stuff in /usr/local (e.g. Homebrew). https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/ https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/
- axotty 12y ago
  This has happened to me during every OS X upgrade/reinstallation I can remember. The first time, I also assumed that it just wasn't working. I've since learned that the 99% is deceiving in terms of the expectations it might give you. You just have to be patient and it'll eventually work.
kossTKR 12y ago
Earlier this year, around 3 months ago, when i bought my brand new Macbook Pro 15" Iris Pro (the one without discrete graphics card). I was i disappointed in the performance of the UI, and i uploaded 3 videos to showcase the problems. A 2000$ dollar machine stuttering when i drag windows around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUE... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTd... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUE...

282 points by blkhp19 12y ago

That's also what I experienced. Yosemite UI Performance is super slow compared to Mavericks. Maybe by rewriting the UI Code they also got rid of speed optimizations from the Bertrand Serlet era :/

hyperbovine 12y ago
Turning off transparency in the Accessibility preferences fixed it for me.
- unicornporn 12y ago
  And now you get the funny black corners in the hud when changing the volume... Polish is needed.
blkhp19 12y ago
Funny you mention that. I interned at Upthere last summer and got to know Bertrand a bit. We had some good conversations about the NeXT days. I wish I was still there now so I could talk to him about this. I'm sure he has some interesting input since he knows the software inside and out.

bluthru 12y ago

Just checked on my 2007 MBP--I'm also getting flashes. (Translucency is turned off.)

cmelbye 12y ago

It's probably too much to hope for a stability and performance focus for iOS 9 and OS X 10.11, but damn if I don't try.

comex 12y ago

Interesting. The flashing at least seems to be an isolated System Preferences bug, as I don't remember seeing it in any other applications. Would be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air in an area typically so subjective and dominated by perceptual biases.

mikhailt 12y ago
Not only that, it only flashes in certain areas of Sys Prefs. For me, I see flashes only in General, Security & Privacy and so on. It looks fine in Dock, Mission Control and so on. I think it is just a bug in certain layouts.
blkhp19 12y ago
Tiger didn't have Mission Control, but I certainly think there are other tests that could be done that really compare all aspects of the OS. I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  Dashboard has become virtually unusable in Yosemite. "Laggy" is an understatement. If I'm activating it after a restart, it can take a full minute for the widgets to become active. The same selection is available instantly in Snow Leopard. Thank goodness I've got a partitioned drive, and can switch back and forth between Y and SL as needed.
- comex 12y ago
  Tiger had Exposé, which is close enough.
- astrange 12y ago
  The "free RAM" statistic is meaningless. Are any applications in particular using lots of private memory?

joshmn 12y ago

I don't know anything of desktop/native applications, but web. My question to the people on the other side of the isle: why aren't all the view panes preloaded, and pre-rendered? In this day and age, where 64mb of RAM is easy to come by, I don't see (as a web developer) why this approach isn't taken.

krakensden 12y ago
You're only counting the application you're looking at though. Multiply that by all the applications running, and pretty soon 512MB of VRAM is looking kinda skimpy. And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a huge amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.
- blkhp19 12y ago
  It's also worth noting that drawing UI elements is relatively inexpensive.
jpttsn 12y ago
System preferences doesn't do this for security reasons.

mikhailt 12y ago

I wish SL were still getting updates, it was the best OS release Apple ever made. It went downhill the moment they went to annual release cycles. I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.

acomjean 12y ago
I agree. I stuck with Snow Leopard as long as I could (enough software was no longer compatible). No other mac OS in my experience was as stable (I've been using system macos 7) I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates. My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.
sgustard 12y ago
Agreed. SL was released under unique circumstances: most engineers were working on the first version of iOS, and the remaining core OS folks had free reign to improve the architecture without management pressure to add features.

conradev 12y ago

Even with "Reduce Transparency" enabled (blur disabled) I've had times when Mission Control operates at 2 frames per second on my 13" 2013 rMBP. This never happened using Mavericks. If you try full screen zoom on Yosemite with an external display attached, it's similarly unusable.

imkevinxu 12y ago
This. I love the full screen zoom but had to turn it off for my thunderbolt display. Also I had a hot corner for Mission Control that was similarly laggy, had to turn that off too :(
- petarb 12y ago
  the zoom with a thunderbolt display attached is unbearable! I really hope they fix the jankiness
jbinto 12y ago
It's good to see this get some attention. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make full screen zoom usable with an external display. I found if you enable the "Increase Contrast" accessibility feature, performance is improved, but it does negatively affect aesthetics. I answered my own question about this on Apple StackExchange here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/157118/70049 http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/157118/70049
sickmate 12y ago
This is one of the clear areas where performance is nowhere near previous versions. One solution is to switch to the "Picture-in-picture" zoom style under the Accessibility preferences.
mindajar 12y ago
Yeah, regardless of transparency settings, WindowServer seems to get really slow after it's been running for awhile (days? hours? it depends.) Restarting the login session or doing a full reboot seems to fix it ... for a little while. Performance goes downhill faster for me with an external display connected.

lucisferre 12y ago

Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the call. This is completely unacceptable behavior and a feature like this should have never been released unless it was exceptionally reliable and seamless. It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore. One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.

tolmasky 12y ago
The phone thing was infuriating. After upgrading all of a sudden every device I own would start ringing like crazy: phone, computer, Apple TV STOPS airplay because the iPad streaming to it was also buzzing like mad. I KNOW I KNOW, you can turn it off, but I hate the fact that upgrading my OS has now become "turn off the 10 gimmick features so you can get back to some level of sanity", especially because after I pick up the call I completely forget about it (I'm not going to not take the call and then start going through the prefs on my x devices). So the other day I finally gave in and just hit accept on my computer -- and ... call failed. Great. I felt like I was on candid camera or something, the employees at Apple viewing me through my iSight camera on my monitor laughing at the sucker who finally took the bait. As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.

blkhp19 12y ago

For those who haven't read the video description: Here's a very quick, unscientific comparison of one tiny aspect of UI performance in OS X Yosemite vs. OS X Tiger. Although this is just one example, I personally see these kinds of hiccups throughout OS X constantly. The machine running OS X Tiger is actually an Intel Core 2 Duo PC (hackintosh) from 2007 with no hardware accelerated graphics support in OS X (it's an unsupported intel integrated graphics chipset that was never used in a real mac, hence the unsupported graphics). Therefore, the Tiger demo is running without QE and CI. The machine running OS X Yosemite is a late 2013 15 inch retina MBP. Automatic graphics switching is disabled for the demo, forcing the machine to use the much more powerful Nvidia graphics card. I also have the power adapter plugged in so that the system isn't in a low power state. I've been using OS X for 8 years now. From 2007 to 2013, I used hackintoshes (custom built with compatible hardware). Those machines ran Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I got my rMBP in 2013 and it's now my primary machine. It first ran Mavericks, then I upgraded it to Yosemite this year. It's been my experience that the performance of all of my machines has noticeably declined since the release of Lion. In terms of UI performance, my rMBP running Mavericks/Yosemite is nowhere near as responsive as any of my Snow Leopard machines were. Fingers crossed that WWDC 2014 focusses on major speed and stability improvements for OS X and iOS. New features are great, but not at the cost of performance.

mrmondo 12y ago

was heavily involved in the beta testing of 10.10, In my experience Yosemite is by far not only the most buggy, but also slowest release of OSX. I am saddened to report that only one of the many performance regressions I reported was actually fixed (In that case within Mail.app). A huge portion of the performance problems seem to be stemming from the graphics subsystem. If you use Yosemite on dual Retina or even WQHD displays you'll know what I'm talking about. Add graphics glitches, immature theming and wireless problems to the over all poor performance and were talking about major issues in areas that OSX has been known as a leader in. My biggest issue is that Apple seems to be ignoring most of the core performance issues that are being reported - just look at the number of unresolved posts on the Apple forums. I do hope that Tim Cook is becoming aware of the drop in reputation that OSX has received since Yosemite and is leading his teams to perform more in depth performance soak testing before releases in the future.

kayoone 12y ago
Its especially bad on the 13" rMBP which has a relatively weak GPU. When using scaled resolutions the UI lag is very noticeable, i also get some redrawing issues of icons. You can improve the situation by disabling transparency effects, but that produces some graphical glitches. In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well. Current GPUs in the Macbooks are just not ready to handle the massive resolutions used for scaling. Just try to run a 60fps youtube video in a scaled resolution and you will see your system load go up to the point the video might even stutter.
- carlob 12y ago
  > In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well. I don't think that 1680x1050 is native or even half-native on the 13. IIRC the Air is 1440x900 and the 13 rmbp is less than that (when you count the points). This is why I keep telling people who want a 13' Mac to get the air, but sadly very few listen…

fiatpandas 12y ago

You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them: "look, this accelerated release cycle, it's not resulting in quality software. It's hurting our reputation. It's not performing on 2 year old hardware. People are losing faith in our ability to release stable bug-free builds. Users shouldn't have to cross their fingers when upgrading. This is Apple." But no, that's probably not happening.

blkhp19 12y ago
I don't even understand who they're competing with by doing yearly updates. It's probably a big scramble to get features released and for what? To beat Windows 8? To beat linux? They don't have any threats when it comes to desktop operating systems, so they should slow down and make some quality updates.
- grandalf 12y ago
  It keeps the size of each update much smaller and less error-prone. Each update contains a few significant changes and lots of minor ones. It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons: - it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis - it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem - it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world. - it lets the actual periodic security updates be used only for critical fixes. Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware. - Apple's biggest strength is attention to UX details. Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data. None of this excuses buggy releases, but overall it's significantly less buggy than any similarly ambitious OS out there.
  - pervycreeper 12y ago
    >it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception >it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can >Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data. They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.

mrpippy 12y ago

I've also had lots of problems with Yosemite, but I don't think this comparison is useful at all. The Hackintosh looks like a fresh install with nothing else running, whereas the rMBP has other apps running. When I don't have 100+ Safari tabs open, Yosemite runs a lot better.

afro88 12y ago
My late 2014 rMBP 15" performs just like the video, and with nothing else running. It's the only thing that's disappointed me with my purchase - their flagship laptop (well, 2nd from the top, I have the 2.2GHz) should run the OS silky smooth. Like my 2010 MBP did when I bought it in 2010.
lstamour 12y ago
The graphical glitches that he notes however, happen even on a powerful, plugged-in 15" retina model. I just tried it myself. Some parts of each screen, including the blue (or grey) themed UI elements for tabs or dropdowns, take longer to move to a selected state. It's unclear whether the delay is due to the time it takes to load the preferences for the screen -- that it can't do so before you click -- or if the graphics themselves take that long to draw but already know what state they should be in. It's funny, I knew something had changed, but I couldn't pin-point it until this video. Until the side-by-side, I figured the glitches were a side-effect from it being "too fast" since there's no transition animation. But it's obvious the animated version simply felt smoother and more integrated as a UI.

tolmasky 12y ago

Animation in general is just plain broken in Yosemite (and iOS 8). I'm not up to date with the latest frameworks, but I believe there's been a fundamental API change, because its basically possible to break any animation by just causing an event to happen before its finished. This happens all the time in iOS, you can get it to break mid-rotation and end up in a half and half state: https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672 https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672 On OS X, its the same thing. Here's me easily repro-ing in Safari: http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation.mov http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation...

lunixbochs 12y ago

I feel like the entire compositor has a performance regression. This includes dragging windows, and seems to have nothing to do with transparency. When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools). I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and typing. I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps. A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings. [1] https://developer.apple.com/downloads/ https://developer.apple.com/downloads/

r109 12y ago
I use BeamSyncDropper v2 and have it open on startup. The only downsize is it takes a bit for the terminal window to load and execute the shell script. If you have an SSD this shouldn't be a problem, just be patient for that 2-3 seconds of painstaking peasantry. xD Download and discussion about BeamSyncDropper can be found here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/customization/92201-beamsyncdropper-tool-disable-beamsync-permanently.html http://www.tonymacx86.com/customization/92201-beamsyncdroppe... Also one thing about OS X running in VMWare is make sure you're using the specific CPU to the fullest potential. Graphics are rendered with the use of CPU. If you don't have the processor(s) / cores set properly you could be only at 50% overall performance. For example, I am currently using an i3 330UM. I've noticed a significant jump in performance switching from single processor 2 cores; to 2 processors 4 cores. Personally, Mavericks outperformed Yosemite on this little machine. I've experienced long window load times, hangs, and even guest crashes since the jump... My main desktop workstation is rocking an i7-930; I WILL NOT upgrade my main VMWare workstation to Yosemite. If I need to I will just clone my current VMWare image and run Mavericks / Yosemite in tandem. I would much prefer Mavericks > Yosemite...
- 12y ago

kenferry 12y ago

This particular issue is probably due to process isolation and sandboxing. In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported. In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process. That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.

srpoder 12y ago

This is simply sad. I downgraded to Mavericks after a week of pain with Yosemite, I won't upgrade again, I don't trust it anymore.

grandalf 12y ago

Not sure what everyone is talking about, I loaded Yosemite on my 3 macbooks (2010 11" air, 2011 13" air, and 2014 13" pro) and it works perfectly on all with no glitching whatsoever.

coldtea 12y ago
Could be a retina thing. I see it on my MBPr 15 2013.
- qubitcoder 12y ago
  Same here with the MBPr 15" 2012. I recommend a clean install of Yosemite. After upgrading from the beta versions to the final release, I still had UI elements misplaced (e.g. the address bar in Safari was 1/3 the width and stuck on the left edge). A clean install fixed the UI alignment and some other minor quirks. I still notice occasional black squares in Safari which cover a portion of the screen; a page refresh seems to resolve the issue. But Firefox developer edition, on the other hand, is snappy and responsive.
- grandalf 12y ago
  my MBP is a MBPr

ps4fanboy 12y ago

I wonder if this was done on the latest apple hardware. Apple always appears to regress older hardware without fail.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
fleitz 12y ago
Yes, generally people want OSs to do more, not operate faster. Therefore most of the time the performance benefits are eaten by additional software. It's most apparent on older hardware that was already running close to max capacity.

mproud 12y ago

Yosemite uses a variation of a cross-dissolve transition when changing/showing content after a mouse click, whereas older versions do not. Give it a try and pay close attention to the window.

tomvo 12y ago

I noticed a lot of UI speed degradation as well, especially when using a dual monitor setup and changing focus from one screen to the other. This was the most visible when OSX tries to refresh the menubar icons. I did a fresh install (instead of upgrade to the beta) and things seem to be a little better but I guess this just has to do with the fresh install clearing my mac of all the bloat that it acquired in the past years.

mergy 12y ago

The decline started with Lion. Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of the OS. They were able to offset or mask some of this with SSD drives. But, it has become pretty sloppy for folks that really wanted to tune their systems for performance. Couple that with the questionable changes on the UI over the last couple major releases and I didn't see anything I wanted anymore.

jjoonathan 12y ago
Lion was also the OS where they started cutting out core functionality (e.g. the ACPI controller) from their open source releases.
yourad_io 12y ago
> Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of the OS. A thousand times this. I stuck it out with 10.6 for the longest time. Eventually, "people" stopped bothering to release for 10.6 (Java 7... :/) and Apple lost me as a customer. Which was a blessing in disguise - I'm very happy with Ubuntu + i3 and wouldn't go back even if they got their shit together.
seanalltogether 12y ago
Adium still lists 14% of their users on Snow Leopard. https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion It's painful to support these days but I'm still trying keep my apps compatible with it.
- zacwest 12y ago
  Adium has had a huge decline in users, though, since then, so the percentage isn't as informative. For example, if you look back to a couple years ago, we had ~180k stats pings for the same week period[1] as we do now at ~20k[2]. I think what you're seeing/reporting here is that users who still use Adium are not entirely upgrading. That's probably true, but has more to do with Messages.app in newer versions supporting iMessage than anything else. (I was one of the Adium developers for years. I don't even use it anymore because of the prevalence of iMessage and the decline in general IM.) [1]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar [2]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar

sesteel 12y ago

I am currently working on an OpenGL based UI toolkit and recently purchased a 4K monitor and a EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti to drive the display for testing purposes. As you might expect, it appears taxing to push 4X the content over the bus or have the card render content at a high resolution. This may not be the effect seen here, but it is the first thing that came to mind. I am not sure how well system hardware has kept up with display technology.

pervycreeper 12y ago
Not strictly resolution dependant. The same problem is present on current model macbook airs and non-retina imacs.

x0054 12y ago

I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow. After 3 days with Yosemite I had to use my wife's 2009 Air for something, it's running Mavericks, and wow, the speed! That day I restored from a backup and now I am back to running 10.9. My battery is back to 6+ hours, and my laptop is flying. I also updated my iPad 3 from iOS 6 to iOS 8. Now it's unusable! So, so, so slow. And that I can't even downgrade. If you are going to screw things up, Apple, can you at least give me an option to downgrade. I think the main problem is the monolithic aspect of the OSX and iOS. Why is the Mail or Face Time app part of the OS?

coldtea 12y ago
>I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow. Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up. Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain? Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?
- x0054 12y ago
  >Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain? >Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case? Yes, I did perform basic investigation. I switched from Chrome to Safari, because Chrome was eating battery like crazy. I shut down anything that I wasn't using. Browsing the internet on Safari I was getting 3.5 hours on a charge. I even timed it! And I am not the only one, read the Apple forums complaining about this. I even reset the PRAM, as Apple recommends. It didn't help. Now I am running a lot more apps, using Chrome, compiling stuff in the background, and still getting my usual 5.5-6.5 hours of battery life (depending on the load). So, yes, I did spent over 20 hours of my life trying to make Yosemite work, and then gave up and switched back to Mavericks. I had a CC backup, so it only took 20 minutes. >Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up. Also, I didn't not mention anything about memory usage, but you are right, the memory footprint was lower. About 1.6gb on average, vs 2.6gb with Mavericks. But I don't care about that, I have 16gb, so I have RAM to spare. On the other hand, I can use all the battery life I can get. Apple does some amazing things, and some really bad things. It's important to give them due credit for the mazing things, and call them out on the crap that they put out as well. Yosemite is very slick looking and a very pretty operating system. But it is very buggy, and what Apple put out as a GM release is beta quality at best.

msie 12y ago

Wow, the day I finally upgrade to Yosemite this story and its comments arrive. Hours too late. :-(

mholt 12y ago

Interesting that this was the UI aspect that was chosen for a video. In my experience, Yosemite performed very poorly when clicking on a folder from the dock (very low framerate). My problems were worse than bad UI though, I was losing data. Yosemite frequently (every other day) crashed hard-core and the only option was to power cycle. Though I save frequently, sometimes I just hadn't hit Cmd+S yet, and in some running processes, it corrupted data. (On a Late 2013 MBP.) Reverting to Mavericks made everything silky smooth again. Not a single crash or performance hiccup. I think I'll stay here for a while.

mukundmr 12y ago

Performance has degraded with Yosemite. Stability is not an issue. I use it on both older and newer machines.

x0054 12y ago

Also, this is part of the final build? https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7o6JO6e_TWQ.png https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7... Really, this bug was reported in the original beta, 6 months ago!

unfunco 12y ago
I think that only happens when UI transparency is disabled. I don't have the same issue[0]. I find Yosemite to be fine with a few exceptions, Safari is not as fast as I'd like it to be, and I've had issues when attempting to answer the phone on my laptop. I think Apple needs a Snow Yosemite, where they focus on fixes and performance with minimal new features. [0]: http://imgur.com/KIIbsfr http://imgur.com/KIIbsfr
- x0054 12y ago
  Yes, it only appears in "reduced transparency" mode, but that's no excuse. Again, this is a well reported bug that many people have noticed 6 months ago and it would take an Apple intern 20 minutes (maybe an hour if they were very inapt) to locate and fix the issue. It's just not a priority to them. I really wish that they would switch to a 2 year OS release cycle, and work harder on stability of the core OS. They can pull Messenger, Mail, Facetime, and all the other apps out of the OS package, and add features to those all they want, but I want the core OS to be stable.
bastih 12y ago
Looks like this bug is fixed in 10.10.2 for me.

gcb0 12y ago

jobs died in the middle of his plan of covering osx and ios and forever owning apple consumers. now crook is executing it without the reality distortion powers that jobs had.

tdicola 12y ago

Have been holding off on upgrading to Yosemite until the dust settles. I find it funny that I'm not even getting nagged at all to upgrade (unlike on iOS where I was getting nagged constantly to upgrade to iOS 8). It's almost like Apple themselves aren't even confident enough in Yosemite to be usable right now.

Yoshino 12y ago

I do agree that Yosemite has had some performance regressions, but people seem to remember the older operating systems with rose colored glasses. I used 10.3 to 10.5 on the 2005 PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz) and it was incredibly slow. Spotlight was nearly useless. The fans would frequently spin up. And let's not talk about Finder locking up when a network mount disappeared. Right now I use 10.10 on the original 2012 Retina MBP, and even though Yosemite is a bit slower than Mavericks it is still leagues faster than (Mountain) Lion on the same machine (which is what it shipped with). The biggest performance regressions I've seen have been in Safari, but Chrome doesn't seem to have the same problems. I think they are paying attention, since 10.10 performance has improved considerably since the first DP, but they need to do more. I wish they would stop fucking with it on a yearly cycle and just release a stable, fast operating system with no new features. The graphics system needs more optimization and they need to kill HFS+ (but that's a whole different can of worms). (Edits: wording)

mayhaffs 12y ago

While loitering in the local Apple store, I got on a new 5k iMac and started launching a bunch of applications with multiple windows, alt-tabbing and clicking around really fast, etc. Normal dev workflow stuff.. Discovering the glitchy flash in the system preferences pane was really unsettling. Almost a uncanny valley type situation. I'm still on Mavericks. I've been waiting for bug fixes from Apple and application support for non-Apple apps before upgrading to Yosemite. But after seeing the glitchy-ness on the 5k and reading these comments.. Both recent upgrades are pretty disappointing. When I first got an iPhone 4, I was astonished by how there were practically zero bugs, especially compared to my previous no-name OS, bug-infested phones. Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite/iOS8? And if so, can we identify potential factors? Technical challenges shifting to Swift? Regular product life cycle growing pains? Decreased focus on OSs from Apple Increased product-lines/technologies? Pivot from price-skimming to market-capture business strategy?

coldtea 12y ago
>Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite/iOS8? And if so, can we identify potential factors? No. There are some bugs and some glitches, like in every release. Nothing to write home about, except from a small percentage of the population with a Mac from a faulty production run (but that's hardware, not the OS), or with some software that's hogging the cpu (but that's the software, not the OS). I have this flashing in System Prefs -- it's a small annoyance, but nothing especially interesting or getting in the way. There are 2-3 more bugs. And some things introduced I was there from OS X 10.2. People have complained for every single OS X release...
- fleitz 12y ago
  Haha 10.2, yeah in 10.2 you were lucky if you could get something working after 30 minutes in bash.
oldspiceman 12y ago
Discovering the glitchy flash in the system preferences pane was really unsettling. Almost a uncanny valley type situation. I need to see a video of this moment.

rmetzler 12y ago

Not really sure what causes this, but I learned that Apple changed the layouting algorithm to Cassowary a few years ago [1]. Because languages have different word length (eg. German words tend to be much longer than English words) and UIs should be readable in every language. Apple now uses constraints to layout the UI and the algorithm tries to find a good solution through iteration and has to reiterate for every size change. Visual effect might also trigger this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_%28software%29

carlosrg 12y ago
Mmm, that could be one of the causes. Definitely something changed after Lion.
zw 12y ago
As someone who has used it extensively, Auto Layout is not a cause for performance UI regressions. Not by a long shot.

batuhanicoz 12y ago

I did have many of the issues commented here but recent beta releases fixed many of them for me. Wifi seems stable, I can answer phone calls if the phone is nearby, it certainly become faster over time. I'm on a previous generation rMBP 13".

JohnBooty 12y ago

I hadn't noticed any perceptible performance differences in Yosemite on my 2011 MBP. After reading this article, I opened up System Preferences on an external WQHD monitor and... yes, indeed. That transition is not very smooth. Informally, it doesn't seem slower ...it's just not as smooth as the old effect. As another poster noted, in Yosemite those panels now use a cross-dissolve effect instead the simpler slide and fade in earlier versions of OSX. Thing is, I'm not sure I would have noticed this in a million years. How much time do you guys spend clicking around in System Preferences every day? This really affects you? I don't know of any other apps with preference panes that use this effect. I tried two other apps (iTunes and Pages) and neither one uses the cross dissolve. I understand that this small regression is merely emblematic of the issues some of you are experiencing; none of you are claiming that System Preferences itself has a huge impact on your daily lives. But this is such a ridiculous regression to select as the poster child for Yosemite's perceived woes.

blkhp19 12y ago
I totally agree the example I posted is ridiculous. Let me explain why I did it. I was a hackintosh user for years. I got an old lenovo from 2007 with an intel core 2 duo and thought it would be fun to install OS X Tiger on it. Install went smoothly except the intel integrated graphics wasn't supported. I decided to check out System Preferences to see how much had changed in all these years. I immediately noticed this perfectly smooth animation between panels. I couldn't believe it was so slow - and with no graphics driver! So I tried it on my rMBP and it was incredibly laggy. I just quickly recorded it with my phone and thought I'd show just one small part of OS X that really represents a much bigger picture of UI performance regressions.
- kenferry 12y ago
  Hm, I don't think this is a good example if the point is to talk about general graphics slowness, because the slowness here is not due to generic graphics issues. This is slow because each pane is running in its own process and it's doing some complicated cross-process graphics stuff to get all the drawing into the same window. This changed in… maybe Lion?
- 12y ago

kenOfYugen 12y ago

My first Apple Computer was a black MacBook 13" bought in 2007. The OS installed was Leopard and I was extremely happy with it. The experience contained quality, responsiveness, stability as well as productivity enhancements. Hadn't missed Windows and Linux at all. The experience remained perfect as the OS was gradually getting updates up to 10.6.8, the latest Snow Leopard version and the hard disk drive was changed to a solid state drive. At that time I bought a MacBook Pro 13" with an i5 processor, and was introduced to Lion. Believe it or not, I used my older MacBook more. It "felt" much more solid and responsive. Well at some point I gave it away, and was stuck with the Pro model. As the OS updates where coming along, things were expected to get only better, just like I had previously experienced. But no! I'm currently using the latest Yosemite, and hate it when I notice tiny buggy things happening.. [ for example, try to disable the transparency in accessibility features, and get clunky black corner edges around the volume box as you adjust the volume up/down ] As I became a more experienced programmer, I realized that good software is perfect software. Thus anything I notice that's not right (and doesn't get fixed when it's a known issue) is a hint for a lot more bugs that I might never get to experience. So essentially I feel like I've lost the stability and security feelings that used to keep me close to the Mac OS. I really miss Snow Leopard, and hate the path Apple is following. I could bitch about their phones too but that would be more derailing. PS: I wish there was an image out there of Mac OS 10.6.8 I haven't got a spare Apple machine to boot 10.6.7, update it to 10.6.8 and create a bootable disk for my MacBook Pro Does anyone know if such an image exist, or perhaps can create it?

htilonom 12y ago

It's that fucking applegraphicspowermanagement.kext !! I'm not even kidding with that kext name. If you delete the kext, repair caches and reboot you'll see 10x better and smoother animations. More about kext itself; it contains the list of supported graphics cards (poor one) and power states for them. Some states are badly done even with supported graphics cards. I had a lot fun with this kext back in the ole' days after Intel switch.

blkhp19 12y ago
Can you provide a source / more information on this solution? Surely there are drawbacks. And you mention using this solution back in the day - are you sure it's still applicable?
- htilonom 12y ago
  This is coming from Hackintosh scene, but I've had enourmous improvements on real Macs as well, which includes Macbook Pro, Air and Mac Pro (not latest gens). Easiest way is to make backup of applegraphicspowermanagement.kext or just rename it to applegraphicspowermanagement.kext.bak and then rebuild you cache with app like Kext Utility. Only drawback I see is that graphics card will now use native power management and not Mac OS one. One thing I've noticed, applegraphicspowermanagement.kext has list of graphics cards, so if your card is not identified it appears that generic power / sleep states are being used thus producing glitches. A bit more about power / sleep states. You've probably noticed that when you have certain animation first time in OS X, it is choppy, but second and third time it's animated perfectly. That's where applegraphicspowermanagement.kext is messing up the states. You can try it on Launchpad or Mission Control animations. Here's more info on the issue, it's for nvidias but it applies to every graphics cards although ATI is generally more supported on OS X. http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311 http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311 http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit-applegraphicspowermanagementkext-to-unleash-nvidias-gtx-570580-full-power-and-save-energy-at-the-same-time/ http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit-app...

gsands 12y ago

2012 MBP retina with 8gb ram here.. Major performance issues with Chrome -- when videos are playing in tabs, 10+ tabs open, etc. Systems Preferences are the least of the problems I've came across.

Luyt 12y ago

Ah, yes, the flicker and delayed drawing. I noticed that also a few years ago with Windows applications. They used to be written with the Win32 API or MFC or even VCL, but when WinForms became popular it introduced a lot of ugly flickering, especially when resizing windows with many controls on them.

aquanext 12y ago

I'm hoping that 10.11 will perhaps be the release that refines things quite a bit, concentrating on stability and generally cleaning up messes like this. Let's remember that they did a fairly major overhaul of everything with Yosemite. This is just how software works sometimes. But you're right, there was a certain amount of UI stability during the Tiger through Snow Leopard era that I wish that Apple would get back to. Try switching between the tabs in the "About this Mac" dialog. The framerate is truly shameful. Astonishing that it got approved at all. I had to try it on a couple different Macs at the Apple Store to believe that it wasn't some random problem I was seeing.

hubot 12y ago

The performance is ok for me (Air 2011).A bit slower but stable so far.

oldspiceman 12y ago

After Mavericks I swore I would wait to upgrade until the second patch of the next os. So I'm sitting here on Mavericks waiting for 10.10.2 to drop. If you slightly shift your upgrade schedule you're only 3 or 4 months behind. No big deal.

naoru 12y ago

Yeah. Just look at this menu bar when switching focus from internal Retina display to external non-Retina ATD. http://cl.ly/2W172H0l3s0z http://cl.ly/2W172H0l3s0z This bugs the hell out of me. Not so long ago I grabbed myself a G4 MDD with 768M of RAM — it was much more responsible in terms of UI. 3-4 browser tabs slowed it down though, while my current rMBP13" from 2012 works ok with a lot more.

danbee 12y ago
I see this ALL THE TIME. Makes me think that Apple did no testing with dual displays. I've noticed times where it's taken 2-3 seconds to settle down.

wodenokoto 12y ago

Since we all have anecdotal evidence about the merits and perils of any OS update, I find this video of another anecdote extremely counter productive to the discussion. Two systems, with different specs, different resolution and different apps running yielding different UI performance is really useless. If anyone have a spare mac and a few hours doing nothing, please re-do this experiment using fresh OSX installs on same hardware and then we actually have SOMETHING to talk about.

htor 12y ago

This video is pretty useless. Randomly clicking on settings icons on one computer with Tiger and then another with Yosemite is a poor method for comparing UI performance. Does the two computers even have the same hardware and configuration? Many people don't like the look of the new Yosemite UI. That's fine. It's a radical change. But don't make ungrounded statements about the perfomance until you have done some proper testing.

lwh 12y ago

Don't worry, in a few years when iOS gets a major 3D-look visual upgrade it will trickle down to the desktop and things will be back to normal. In the meantime I've switched my macbook to dualboot Linux and only boot up MacOS when I have to use one of the programs not available for Linux.

jokoon 12y ago

I have a mid 2009 13" mbp, and for me, it has been very slow since mavericks, probably bceause it only has 2GB of RAM and no SSD, since recent version of mac os have been optimized to use SSDs. The superdrive is busted, and there's no USB boot possible with this version. Linux or windows-bootcamp are not good options since they both seem to make the laptop ventilate like crazy. I intent to buy a 80 euros 8GB RAM upgrade, but still, it's quite sad to see such solid hardware with such crappy OS. No official way to downgrade. The processor has 3MB of L2 cache and honestly I'm sure a C++ IDE would run better on a linux-running, 300 euros, celeron laptop. I feel like I fell for the apple hype. I really feel apple is now worse than microsoft regarding screwing users. Now you can run windows 7 without a product key, and it won't really bother you too much.

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago

Also, compare this with the "about this mac" dialog, the transitions are slow as hell. This would never, ever have shipped under Jobs.

ghshephard 12y ago

This isn't the first time that things have gone wrong with a new version of OS X. The shift from 10.6.8 to 10.7 was an absolute catastrophe from both a performance and a stability basis. 10.8/ML was slightly better, and, I've stayed on 10.8.5 waiting for 10.9/Mavericks to stabilize. From colleagues who use it, and the various KEXTs that I also have, it looks like Mavericks, and KEXT support for it, actually hit a pretty good stability plateau around June/July of this year - so I"m looking forward to upgrading to it sometime early in the next year. There is zero chance that I'm going to be considering 10.10/Yosemite as my production platform (if at all) any earlier than 2016. I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system. Was the older one really all that bad? About the only thing I'm missing right now is Omnifocus doesn't support 10.8 (10.9 or newer). Other than that, I can live with the various warts on 10.8.5 (particularly now that FTDI drivers don't kernel panic my system every time I pull out the USB cable) - Kernel Panics are now a biweekly (instead of every couple days)event, and my only real need to reboot the system is when my USB devices aren't recognized (usually after a sleep) - but a 3 minute reboot and everything is fine again. Still - I think it's good to call Apple on their crap - 10.6 was actually a pretty decent release, and I don't think they've managed to get one that good out since then.

echoless 12y ago
> I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system. The difference with this release is that it's a pretty big UI overhaul and some developer features such as storyboards for Mac aren't available on older versions. People who develop for the Mac or iOS have little choice but to upgrade. I've been running Yosemite since DP 1, and haven't had any major problems yet. There are minor annoyances, but on the whole, Yosemite's feels like a step up over Mavericks(after using it for a little while). Although I should mention that I have a pretty beefy computer with 12Gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card.
SloopJon 12y ago
One of the side effects of the lackluster speed bump the rMBP got for Mid 2014 is that you can get a cheaper, nearly identical Late 2013 model without Yosemite.

mzaouar 12y ago

The UI performance decline is more drastic in "System Preferences" than in the rest of the system. It's because some of the pref panes (General, Security & Privacy, etc..) are actually remote views and involve launching processes for security (address space separation) reasons.

rado 12y ago

My biggest OS X problem of 10 years – switching keyboard language – got worse in 10.10, because now it doesn't work at all in the "Share" dialog.

kaffeinecoma 12y ago

I read so many reports of Yosemite being faster that I was beginning to think I was the only one who was disappointed. I have an older machine (2010 Mac Pro tower), but it's been upgraded to 16GB RAM and an SSD over the years. I experienced an initial degradation in UI performance with Mavericks, but after the first OS update it was as fast as ever. Yosemite comes out, and now it takes over second to switch between Safari tabs on an otherwise idle machine. I had hoped that like Mavericks, this would be resolved in the first OS update, but no such luck. I enabled the "reduce transparency" option (this was recommended to speed up the UI) but it didn't help. My mid-2012 MBr doesn't seem to suffer from this. I wonder if Apple just didn't consider video cards in older hardware. Not an unreasonable thing to do, but I'd have preferred a "sorry, this machine can't run the latest OS" message instead.

alexggordon 12y ago

It's sad really. I continually have incredibly high expectations for OS X and it's new releases. However, they keep proving me wrong time and time again. I used to be incredibly "gung ho" about upgrading to Apple beta's. Then, with iOS 7, that all changed. I had to do something I've never had to. I took the beta off my phone and put back on iOS 6. Same with iOS 8 -> iOS 7, despite the nagging feeling at the back of my head that I shouldn't upgrade. I think the real issue is, that ideals like Facebook's "move fast and break things"[0] (important to note they've stopped using that technique) has become the moral of big companies to fight the decreasing return on investment each new developer brings. To compare, the impressive thing to me about Google is that they ship so fast, with so few issues. Despite Tim Cooks solid leadership, I think Apple is really in a grey area right now. Yeah, their profits are at an all time high, but the reason the profits exist is because they have the best hardware and software combination. As soon as one side of that edge goes away, then it might be prime time for a dedicated Microsoft to step back in. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/reflecting-on-3-years-at-facebook/415679363919 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/reflecti...

nuwin_tim 12y ago

The only application holding me back from using Linux on all my machines is xcode.. only if there was a wine for mac apps that could run xcode.

jorisw 12y ago

Might help to disable all those animations/transitions they keep adding. I have entered these defaults settings on all my Macs and they have sped up my experience a lot: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477/70074 http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477/70074

serve_yay 12y ago

I don't know what it is exactly, these things are very subjective, but the UI does seem to have lost some feeling of smoothness. Transitions are starker than they used to be, strange blinks as you see in this video, and more. I am not sure what to think of our current era of Apple products. The software seems to be more slapdash now, as if they are trying to do too many things at once. On the other hand, this was the first time I upgraded the OS and all my development tools worked without my wasting time on silly problems. They do seem to be more developer-friendly now, but I mean that purely in a technical sense. In terms of developer relations they are perhaps worse than ever.

general_failure 12y ago

For me the installation bombed. Just locked up forever in 1 min remaining.

jbinto 12y ago
It would have finished eventually. This only happens if you have a lot of stuff in /usr/local (e.g. Homebrew). https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/ https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/
axotty 12y ago
This has happened to me during every OS X upgrade/reinstallation I can remember. The first time, I also assumed that it just wasn't working. I've since learned that the 99% is deceiving in terms of the expectations it might give you. You just have to be patient and it'll eventually work.

kossTKR 12y ago

Earlier this year, around 3 months ago, when i bought my brand new Macbook Pro 15" Iris Pro (the one without discrete graphics card). I was i disappointed in the performance of the UI, and i uploaded 3 videos to showcase the problems. A 2000$ dollar machine stuttering when i drag windows around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUE... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTd... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUE...