It is a shame to see Apple using the same tactics as iOS with macOS, which in my opinion a different beast when it comes to upgrades.
I really regret upgrading to High Sierra, because — thanks to a still unfixed graphics driver issue, my 2014 rMBP reboots/lags/breaks when using the GPU. Fortunately, I managed to remedy it with a beta Nvidia driver; without a pro-user mindset, I can only imagine how many people are frustrated by this issue alone, not to mention their apps breaking as a result of a 'forced' upgrade!
High Sierra has the same lack of 'internal polish' as iOS 11, and as a result, it's going to leave a lot of users scratching their heads in anger.
Part of me misses the days when getting an OS X update was an event that required a trip to an Apple Store to pick up (read: pay) a DVD :)
I'm having significant problems with High Sierra on MBPR 2013. WindowServer memory usage can get up to 5-8 GB before it starts to consume insane amounts of CPU and the system basically locks up and I need to reboot the system.
Also simple application drawing starts to fail too, I've encountered visual errors like this https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-2... in multiple applications, Xcode's console/stdout window breaks often. Quite interesting features for a stable release indeed.
It sounds like this has been pretty consistent, but I haven't had one problem since upgrading my late 2013 MBP. It's an i5 2.4Ghz, with 8G mem. Onboard 1500MB for graphics, no GPU.
Right now my WindowServer is only around 240 MB and I haven't rebooted in a couple of weeks. Not one visual error either.
)
And I'm running a long-open instance of Chrome, Hyper term (Electron-based terminal emu), Itunes, Mail, Keybase, XCode, and Atom.
Each time I open one of those I see a memory drop of about 1G, but I run Memory Cleaner to keep an eye on it, and running a quick flush clears up about a gig with no performance drops.
That visual issue looks extreme! I've not had a single problem besides the odd program needing updated to be able to run.
I did wait until the first official release to upgrade the OS, though. I didn't grab the beta.
This bug frustrated the hell out of me and was fortunately fixed in 10.13.1 update. There are a couple more window manager related bugs (I think), it crashes and logs me out frequently while watching videos in VLC.
I was running into a bug with Sierra where the Cocoa version of Emacs would sometimes trigger a bug in DisplayServer that made it use 100% CPU. Fortunately, that is solved in High Sierra.
Unfortunately, I have some other fun regressions:
- Preview has become pretty much unusable. It crashes often when zooming PDFs. It also often doesn't linearly go through pages/slides when pressing the down key when a thumbnail is selected.
- The other day my MacBook Pro (2016) showed the charge icon, but it didn't actually charge. I noticed when it was at 5%. Unplugged and plugged the charger and it works again.
- Keynote doesn't open (some?) presentations produced with PDF2Keynote anymore. This worked fine in the previous version of Keynote.
I have a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro and I've been using High Sierra since the GM release and I haven't seen any of those problems. No visual artefacts in Xcode, either.
> High Sierra has the same lack of 'internal polish' as iOS 11, and as a result, it's going to leave a lot of users scratching their heads in anger.
I've avoided upgrading to macOS High Sierra just to wait and see how it turns out. I'm less cautious with iOS, and am currently frustrated by two things in iOS 11:
1. The WiFi/Bluetooth radio behavior in Control Center (to compensate I use Siri to turn those off, but that's cumbersome too). The recent beta of 11.2 has a popup announcing the new behavior, and that sounds like a terrible idea by itself. Instead of giving more control to the users, Apple, for my needs, has made a terrible decision on this one. (Of course, I have read comments from other people who actually like this new behavior).
2. The bloat in the OS, which causes terrible lag in different screens (including Settings) when it's running on last year's device (an iPhone 7). I don't play games or do video editing and other activities that might need more RAM. My usage has been the same as it was on iOS 10, but the device is sometimes a pain to use. I'd expect such slowness in a device that's three or four years old, since Apple doesn't seem to optimize for older devices, but last year's device??? I've restarted the phone, reset it, updated to the latest .x version as soon as it's been released, but nothing has helped (my flash storage is less than half used - so it's not that either).
Overall, I guess I'm just echoing what some others have said over the last few years - the software quality and "it just works" mantra that Apple used to take pride in is gone. If anyone in Apple were to ask me what it should focus on, I'd suggest something like two releases on the lines of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which was primarily under-the-hood changes to optimize things and make it better and faster. I'm certain iOS needs this kind of effort badly.
FWIW, I've also provided this feedback to Apple at apple.com/feedback and I'd suggest others who're concerned or have issues do the same.
This slowdown has happened consistently in every release since iOS 6. Apple just optimizes the experience for the latest iDevices, which are always blazing fast, but then they slow down drastically as the years go by.
This is either an engineering decision (let's just focus our efforts on the latest thing) -- but then optimizing the whole iOS would speed up ALL of the devices, wouldn't it?; an economic decision justified as an engineering one (who cares about the old devices? let's just sell them a new one); or incompetence.
Apple supports OSX 10.13 on seven year old devices and iOS on four year old devices. And the only reason they don't support it longer is because older devices aren't 64-bit. If it was an economic decision they would just match Android's support lifetimes.
Also I use a 17 inch 2011 every day and it's just as fast as it ever was.
Support and optimize are two way different things. The cynic in me says they support those old devices for purposes of getting people to upgrade so their device slows way down and they have to purchase a new one. I know I’ve been caught in that a couple times.
> echoing what some others have said over the last few years - the software quality and "it just works" mantra that Apple used to take pride in is gone
You and those people would be completely wrong. The quality has been about the same.
What you are doing is remembering OS releases when they were at the end of their cycle e.g. 10.4.11 instead of remembering them at the start. Right now we are at iOS 11.1 and OSX 10.13.1 i.e. the buggiest these releases will have ever been.
I really regret upgrading to High Sierra, because — thanks to a still unfixed graphics driver issue, my 2014 rMBP reboots/lags/breaks when using the GPU. Fortunately, I managed to remedy it with a beta Nvidia driver; without a pro-user mindset, I can only imagine how many people are frustrated by this issue alone
I honestly see why normal users never want to upgrade anything, for any reason. The first 5K iMac I used was an upgrade nightmare: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/01/5k-retina-imac-and-mac-os... . Many of the x.0.0 OS X / MacOS releases have edge-case bugs and one gets in return minimal user-visible functionality improvements. So why bother?
> Part of me misses the days when getting an OS X update was an event that required a trip to an Apple Store to pick up
Part of me misses updates like Snow Leopard where the only reason I wanted it was because it saved 7GB of HD space and improved performance. I would 100% buy OS updates that all they did was optimize existing code.
Especially since this "OS" is so far from being just that. In the tour of new features, the first 3 were about editing/organizing photos, then there were a bunch for a browser I don't use followed up by some changes to a mail client that isn't webmail.
I'm sure High Sierra includes plenty of lower-level improvements too, but I fail to see why a photos app isn't an optional add on or distinct app from the app store, especially when the OS download is over 5 GB and done in the background without asking. Maybe I'm just a purist, but I'd like my OS to focus on system stuff rather than application stuff.
After all the trouble you went through, would you really call your experience an "upgrade"? It sounds like you are barely tolerating upgrades. In terms of user experience, Apple has terrible UX because they impose on their users so much.
There is no justification for what Apple is doing. They are downgrading and arguably damaging your computer, because 1) they are too lazy to support more than one operating system, 2) they want to use you as a beta tester 3) they want to ensure the integrity of their DRM ecosystem. It is the same reason that I am coerced into installing Sierra if I want to put a video on my iPad that they forced an iOS9 update onto (I would have to "upgrade" iTunes which requires that I update the OS).
Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less of a problem before. If you want to keep using an old Mac, there are plenty of OS install disks, copies of old shareware floating around, sites like Low End Mac which document what works and what doesn't. The hardware was also usually more repairable. I'm worried that current Macs in the age of App Store OS updates and glued battery will be rendered into expensive paperweights that much more certainly when Apple withdraws support.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple employees tended to test on the newer Apple gear, and older models sat somewhere as part of a bulk testing unit, meaning they don't personally experience the same slowdowns as you.
Indeed. When I was on a six month contract for Retail Software Engineering, I observed that everyone had hardware that was at least a year or two old. I was told that the new hardware is reserved for paying customers, and if you wanted a new machine you could use your employee discount to buy one.
Otherwise, the only people who get the latest hardware are those who need to test or develop code on it, and that is a very small fraction of the total number of employees.
1) Mac supports multiple operating systems through BootCamp.
2) Apple has a beta program if you want to see what beta releases actually look like. What Apple is doing is releasing updates in a more agile fashion i.e. more frequent at the expense of longer test/fix iterations.
3) Apple has no DRM on the Mac and on iOS it isn't about rights management. It's purely about not allowing side loading of apps to ensure security and privacy.
4 There are plenty of ways to put videos on an iPad that doesn't require iTunes nor an OS update.
I feel like I'm seeing a trend here. An OS reaches a very stable point where users are happy. But the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse. I think it's why people were stuck on Windows XP for so long, and now Windows 7 will be the one people hold onto as long as possible (if they weren't automatically upgraded). The most recent versions of iOS and macOS are in the same boat: the feature list is uninteresting to most people, but the update is pushed on them, and there's a good change it will break your install/slow things down/break some apps. I haven't bothered updating to High Sierra, since after installing Sierra I was left wondering what I had gained. I disabled Siri after the first week of never using it.
Side note, it's annoying that Apple ties app updates to OS updates. One of the big selling points this time seems to be the new photo app stuff, like you can't just release that for everyone?
There's this other item currently on the front page, which is also relevant --- some users seem to want updates, regardless of whether it actually fixes thing for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15727749
Personally, I abhor this continuous churn too; I'm a developer myself, but I'd rather spend the time to fix small things and in general drive towards that asymptotic stability than attempt huge breaking changes in the fashionistic sense.
I used to think this way. Like downloading updates was making my computer better in mystical ways. Maybe it's just fun to get new things, even if you don't really know what they are. Years of using and developing software has given me a more pragmatic (or grumpy) outlook. It's the most annoying when something new comes along and somehow disrupts a productive workflow, I think that's why devs are so annoyed at Apple right now.
This isn’t the first time on this merry-go-round. Snow leopard to lion was a downgrade in as many ways as it was an upgrade. I also remember reluctantly trading in NT4 for W2K. OS release quality isn’t a linear progression, it’s a sine wave.
Linux has had its share of regressions: KDE 3-> KDE 4 and the accompanying destructions of amazing apps like Amarok 1.4. Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3. The period where Ubuntu tried to replace everything with half-baked Mono apps, etc.
This is a reason I enjoy Ubuntu 16.04 so much. My drivers are stable. My programs work. My UI is i3wm and isn't going to change or improve much, it has reached a near maximum efficiency level and i3 aims to be very stable and do its job and not "innovate". The laptop hardware is supported and stable, the drivers aren't changing. All systems are go.
MacOS? Always innovating with new "features" like APFS. Are they truly making the OS easier to use in some novel way for non technical users? Are they improving things for technical users? I know technology changes and APFS is supposed to make SSDs better, but... the general sentiment is just what you stated.
My iPhone 4 used to work great with a given OS. All it needed was security updates for 3+ years, instead after about 2 the latest updated was unusable. iOS "improvements" were very hit and miss. Some were good, some were not. I do not mind mobile OS improving as much though.... that hardware has still been improving rapidly offering much better features so the more rapid OS updates kind of make sense there in terms of supporting the latest hardware.
But laptops? What has changed.....
The f* touch bar? The amazing keyboard? The Retina display?
Only one of those was a real innovation and it has been supported for a long time.
I'd agree with your perceived trend. Ubuntu has the right idea with the LTS releases. Microsoft had the right idea with the LTSB, but ruined it by making it limited to enterprise customers.
I hope Apple and Microsoft will start to realize many of their customers see the OS as the layer for getting things done, and not as an end to itself. Annual, or semi-annual, feature updates are not fun, waste time with a slow install, and the features are frequently unwanted. And with the lack of QA in both companies, each major update brings a whole host of new bugs.
This does make Linux appealing to me at the moment. If a major distro changes something that bothers you, you can count on someone to fork and maintain the old way. There are trade-offs of course, but it's possible to keep you system just the way you like for a long time while still getting updates where they are important.
> the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse
It isn't the company that feels the need to stay relevant, it's the UI designers & developers. They have to keep changing thins to justify their existence.
I regret upgrading. My Mac was wonderfully stable before the upgrade. Now it periodically crashes, as in full hard crash/reboot.
Sometimes it fails to recognize one of my two external monitors, and when I wake it from screen saver or screen off (energy saver, but with laptop still running), it flashes the three displays a while and fumbles around trying to decide what goes where before _finally_ allowing me to unlock. And after I unlock, all my windows have been rearranged and shoved onto one display.
I find no improvement or redeeming value in High Sierra. It's almost as bad as my new Windows 10 laptop next to it... in fact with the crashes it's now even worse.
Apple has been on the path of self destruction, dare I say, since Jobs died. He may have had some goofy ideas, but apparently his dictator like control and obsession with details was worth more than I realized. Sadly for us users, especially developers, we'll soon have no OS that works great all the time.
I experienced a similar disappointment after installing one of the Sierra security updates. It introduced some external display issues [1] which to this day have gone unfixed. I've spent hours with Apple support, both in chat and over the phone, explaining the issue and providing them with debug data. They told me multiple times it was being looked into by engineering and would continue to update me. But time and time again they would schedule a follow-up phone call that never came or tell me I'd receive an email follow-up that would never arrive.
I also echo the sentiment that it's difficult finding a practical alternative.
Agreed. After using macOS High Sierra for a few days, I was in shock and decided to downgrade to Sierra immediately. Downgrading macOS can be difficult, and in this case it was also necessary to restore the HFS+ file system. Fortunately, I had a good backup and enough spare time to do it correctly.
If we lay all these complaints of "the update is worse" end-to-end, from the first OS X to today, we'd get some sort of eternally crashing MC Escher OS :)
Something is absolutely not right then, because APFS is MUCH faster indexing, listing, and instantaneously showing file/folder sizes. I'm running it on an unsupported MacPro 3,1 and it runs like a dream.
You're not running it on old platter drives are you? It's made for SSD.
This has became the new normal it seems. Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work (or to start it in the middle of the night and not switch it back off).
This is purely something that these companies do for their own good without any regard for the user. They probably think "What are you going to do about it? Install Ubuntu?"
I’ve had it up to here with pushy updates. Tragedy of the commons: every app thinks it’s important enough to update several times per week.
On any given day, at least one of Windows, Firefox, VSCode, or myriad other less important apps wants to update before it runs. Talk about pessimising app start times! App start time is now the time to download and reinstall!
Windows FCU silently borked 6 of my machines by steamrolling drivers I had carefully selected for stability and performance. Broke GPU and Wifi on 5 of those, and it took me half a day to figure out what changed. On my main dev machine, Windows Update got into an infinite loop of churning the disk 100% and never finishing. Every fix I tried did nothing, until finally I disabled all WU services.
So in resignation, I did install Ubuntu. And was quickly reminded why I don’t use it. Ironically, the productivity-killer there is also about updates: for any app I need to run properly, I have to update its whole lineage of dependencies, often manually, and work out which versions it likes.
So I’m reluctantly back to Windows. I’ve just changed all the update settings I can find to ask me or just leave me alone and let me get a little work done.
> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work
To play devil's advocate, the system provides great APIs for preserving work during reboots (above and beyond just saving to files, full state restoration of all UI in the system frameworks). It's arguably only poorly designed software that does not do this.
I don't fully believe this, but it's one way of looking at it. For pro users, shouldn't be rebooting, for most users, they shouldn't notice.
Applications shouldn't need to care, because the computer should not ever be rebooted for the vast majority of security updates --- the ones that everyone will be fine with (even those who otherwise hate upgrading), the ones that fix things like buffer overflows, the ones that actually matter to security.
It is highly irritating to see that the "patch" to fix one unchecked buffer copy turns out to require half a dozen whole-file-replacements and takes tens of MB, when ultimately only a handful of bytes needs to be changed. Perhaps these companies should learn from the crackers and reverse-engineers and make patches that are actually patches: find and modify the appropriate bytes in memory, and also the file on disk. Those who have used crack/noCD/etc. patchers will know how fast and painless the experience is. The changes are instant and persistent, with no disruption at all.
If such a system was used, I would guess that security updates may, instead of the hundreds of MB or even GB they take today, and take tens of minutes or more to install (not even counting the productivity lost by the obligatory reboots), only be MB at most --- with the majority being several KB, install instantly, and present absolutely no disruption.
drpm files on Fedora 25+ spring to mind, along with jigdo and zsync (Debian, Ubuntu - for full isos). I'm sure they will get there, but then perhaps different installs have a different set of files that need to be replaced?
> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work
This is something I've found fault with in Windows, and was greatly disappointed to see happen in Sierra.
I had been getting the High Sierra update reminder notification once a day for several days and normally just clicked "Remind me tomorrow" (since there's no option for "Don't remind me"). One day after having it pop up, I instead clicked "Try in an hour".
I expected this to ask me again in an hour, at which point I would choose whether or not to proceed with the update. Instead, while my MacBook was asleep with work open, it went ahead and updated the OS without my consent.
I don't (think) I lost any work, as I typically save things and Vim didn't leave any swp files. But the experience was disconcerting and bitterly reminiscent of Windows...
Do for their own good? I see this as for the collective good, as most of the people hurt by unpatched software are NOT microsoft but people, small businesses, and the victims of the resulting botnets.
Obviously if you know what this is you can turn it off.
This sort of subtle authoritarianism in the name of "security" is quite frankly extremely disturbing, and the companies are using it to force what they want by bundling plenty of other highly disruptive and completely-non-security changes too. I could go into a more political direction here, but looking at some of the other changes that have happened to society in general lately, I'm not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.
I mean, I’d rather just not have internet connected devices at all. But the internet is a commons, and people who don’t patch ruin it for everyone.
But, there’s a difference between auto update by default and forced updates. And there’s, again, the option of buying the same thing with no internet connection—pretty much nothing you own needs to be connected to the internet at all.
The issue with having an off switch is that non-tech-savvy people will blindly follow some instructions to disable it and will get caught by a major security vuln.
Case in point: when Chrome throws a TLS error, you could type "danger" to bypass it, but they had to change it because businesses started teaching users to bypass errors blindly.
Not exactly apples to apples, but similar enough in my mind. If users blindly disable updates, they won't be updated when there's a major security patch.
A good reminder that if a software company is given enough trust to auto update, keeping that trust us important. Seems the big boys have been breaching that trust a lot lately.
This is true. But i’m ok with stupidity hurting individuals—at least in terms of compromise—i’m less ok with default settings being potentially insecure one day.
I don't like the pattern Apple is using there. But comparing it with Microsoft?!?
Microsoft was a lot more aggressive and shady, and used a bunch of evil UI patterns, like installing it by clicking "Cancel" button. Or displaying a second start button that opens the shady installer instead of the start menu. macOS auto downloading is not right, but it is whole level below that.
No, it’s the same really. Automatically downloading I’ve 5GB of data in the background without permission is some incredibly shady shit. There are people in Australia with data plans that this would literally still cost hundreds of dollars.
I often use my laptop with my mobile hotspot when I'm outside the house, and 5GB of data would cost me $50. Which is more than Apple used to charge to buy a MacOS X install DVD. Most months I only need $5 - $10 of mobile data.
(Side note: I had no idea you can still buy Snow Leopard DVDs from Apple! Costs $30.99 including shipping:)
Gosh, I miss Snow Leopard now. The best OS Apple ever did, IMO. Super stable and totally about "getting shit done." In the years I was running it, I don't ever remember my system crashing.
The difference is that the App Store Control Panel on the Mac allows the user to make the decision that updates should or should not be downloaded in advance of the decision to install the update.
Downloading in the background is not the same as installing without warning. Yes, Apple should make the install notification more clear to prevent users from clicking blindly. That’s not the same as surreptitiously tricking users (it is possible to decline the update on macOS). These are separate griefs.
I beg to differ. Microsoft used underhand tactics to force Windows 10 on users, where at one point closing the upgrade prompt window by clicking the X at the top-right was taken as permission to install. The difference between Windows 8.1 and 10 was marked, particularly because when Windows 10 was first released it was extremely buggy, and the in-place installation broke swathes of drivers, programs and lost settings. (At least, this was my experience as the person called to fix such problems).
>Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened.
I'm not upset with any one device because I'm sure they all have an option to disable auto download. But there is now so much auto downloading that goes on in my house (I can think of 15 devices top of my head) that my wifi often can't reliably stream Twitch or YouTube.
I think I'm at the point in the tech story of my home that I would love a UI that shows total and per-device usage history. With knobs to throttle each device on a temporary or permanent basis.
I’ve got a Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite as The Router for my house. Not sure if it does exactly per-device but if you enable it, it can show traffic per host/ip, site ‘category’, etc. It’s quite a nice little piece of kit.
Speed-wise,it’s also very good. It’s plugged in directly to my FiOS and I’m maxing out my 150/150.
Their APs are very good as well. Blazing fast, quick to set up, easy to manage, and they come out of the box with absolutely everything you need for any kind of mounting or installation.
After getting so frustrated with really expensive consumer WiFi routers I finally decided to give Ubiquiti a try. I purchased an Edge Router Lite and a dual channel AC Pro access point for about the cost of a nice consumer model.
It took all of 10 minutes to get everything plugged in and configured and every WiFi issue I had in my house disappeared. I was immediately pissed at myself, why the heck did I resist the jump for so long?
Bonus points for the APs being POE, makes it a lot easier to put them on the ceiling, and more bonus points because I have not reset my router in 18 months.
You can use the TCP port (http vs bittorrent vs email, or individual games which often use a well-known port for communication), deep packet inspection (eg. to distinguish between normal web and HTTP video streaming), reverse IP lookups to detect location of the remote endpoint or what company it's assigned to (through AS number for example).
My router does it with a comprehensive list of (sub)domain => category. It may not have anywhere near 100% precision, but for the sake of what this subthread talked about, it good enough to know who eats your bandwith and for what.
The upgrade to 10.13.1 has effectively locked my SSD in read-only mode because reading from it would always cause an APFS kernel panic (both under 10.13 and 10.13.1) also making it impossible to boot from it. It took me several hours to figure that out and to restore my data. I now downgraded to 10.12.6 and I am not missing anything. I think I am going to switch to Ubuntu as soon there is a comparable laptop to MacBooks from ~2015 (perhaps in 1-2 years?). This kind of nonsense is just not worth my time and money when I just need Firefox, ZSH and Emacs anyway.
I also don't like how much they are pushing for me to install IOS 11 on my 5S. I know it's going to be unbearably slow but I intend to keep this phone for another year, so I want to stay on IOS 10
I have a 5S and iOS11 actually improved my phone's performance. The biggest hurdle for me was adjusting to the UI/UX changes.
I actually had issues with iOS10 where my phone was consistently full no matter how much I removed from it. I had to remove almost everything to upgrade, but once I did it had cleared up most of the memory on my phone. The OS took up more space, but it seemed to have optimized whatever excesses were consuming everything before.
Were you on 10.3 before? The most likely explanation of what you saw is the APFS migration, but you should have already gotten that in the 10.3 update.
Interesting point. I was, but not for very long. I was on 10.2 for the longest time. In the process of upgrading to 11, I upgraded to 10.3 for a few hours and didn't notice, but I didn't clear out as much from my phone until I moved to upgrade to 11, so I can't confirm one way or the other.
I can say I've noticed an improvement in performance overall, though. And at the very least, it hasn't slowed down or run into any major bugs.
It would be a good thing if iOS was stable as it should be. iOS 11 is a buggy mess that I regret updating to.
I'd rather miss out on few security updates for a year, than have my phone completely freeze, require reboots, etc quite often - and this isn't even an old phone, it's 7+. And let's be honest, the security issues aren't even that easily exploitable or can be mitigated some other way.
I will never again update macOS and iOS until at least few months, and newer fix versions, after release - I've had nothing but problems with both.
I have a 6s and regret upgrading to 11. Slow and unstable. Frankly I don’t do enough sketchy crap on the phone to care about security updates as much as I’m supposed to.
It always amazes me how subjective adjectives like "slow" and "unstable" are when referring to software. I too have a 6s (plus), and iOS 11 has been just as fast and stable as iOS 10 in my experience.
This kind of disparity makes a lot of sense in the PC world, where everyone has slightly different hardware. I can't quite figure out why it's still common on a platform where there is relatively no hardware variation.
I mean if I had devices side by side of different OSes, I’m confident I could measure it. Time to open applications, like the phone dialer and messages, is noticeably slower than ever before for me. Another issue is that now when I open my recent calls, it shows a cached image of its last state for a few seconds before it refreshes with the most recent state. Unfortunately, in those few seconds, I usually already clicked the contact I wanted to call back, only to see the screen refresh after my click and find out I’m calling someone I did not mean to call. This is the same annoying way that Safari treats the back button, but I’m sad to see that pattern creep into other apps. I’d rather see a loading screen than a false view.
I keep screenshots of battery use in iOS. I went from 10.3.3 to iOS 11 when it was available. Gave it the obligatory 3 days to "stabilize" and was amazed at how crappy it was. Given my usage I was seeing about 4.5 hours Usage at the 50% mark on 10.3.3. On iOS 11 it was down to 3.25 hours. I tried all the Public betas up to 11.2B1. I DFU'd. I set up as new. I ran without my usual assortment of apps and just used the stock ones. I jumped through every single hoop I could and iOS 11 was just a downgrade for me.
It's also good for Apple's pocket. It's really good for them when people have to buy a new phone just because the old phone is extremely laggy after a mandatory update.
I don't agree with that but they shouldn't be allowed to stop signing the old versions. People should be able to downgrade if they have a need or desire to do so.
There has to be a middle ground. If I want to run iOS 10, I should get a set number of years (3? I'd be happy with 3) Apple will back port security fixes to it instead of being forced to run the dumpster fire that is iOS 11. Simply continuing to sign old versions or make them available isn't enough.
Hopefully the EU takes this up, as they’re far more pro consumer than the US.
For sure, and I don't personally recommend that anyone jump on a dot-0 release of anything. But Apple aggressively attacks dot-0 bugs — iOS 11 is already at 11.1.2[1], and I'm running an 11.2 dev release that's been nicely boring for me.
I have a 5S and recently had to upgrade so that a vendor would provide technical support. They stated they only provide support for their application running on the latest version of iOS that Apple supports for your device.
I had held off and finally upgraded as the app is fairly important to me and I wanted to get the issue resolved.
Now input is 10+ seconds lagged, everything is significantly slower and apps frequently run out of memory and I end up at the home screen.
Unfortunately the iOS upgrade didn’t fix the issue and I’m still dealing with the vendor.
If you keep enough media on your phone so that free space < space required for iOS update, it won't be able to download the update or nag you about it. If it has already downloaded an update, delete it manually, then copy more media to your device.
Not sure, does Apple overprovision iDevice SSDs to save the user from manually managing free space? iOS11 update is around 2GB, so 1.9GB free space will be enough to block the download.
The sibling posts seem to have had a better experience, but iOS 11 slowed down my beloved 5s to the point where I had to give up and order an iPhone SE. Apple wins again... Maybe that won't be enough though, as opening the camera can take 10+ seconds even on my iPad Pro.
I haven't been unpleasantly surprised by an iOS upgrades in the past, despite what I've heard. This one does sound particularly warty though, so while I'll install 11 eventually i'm waiting for them to advance a few minor versions.
The entry model of MacBook Pro comes with just 250GB,
I personally struggle to keep 30GB free (I need to have Android SDK and iOS SDK installed)
When having less than 20GB the OS gets slow, so I usually run DaisyDisk to find what can I delete, I didn't like to find the high sierra installer there.
On the side note, I didn't update to High Sierra because it seems that there are issues with XCode 9 (slow simulator) so I can't risk.
Even though you were downvoted, this is a valid observation. You don't need 250GB of space to watch youtube / netflix or surf social networks or send emails or use iMessage or any of the basic tasks that most people use computers for. The large size of Xcode definitely helps them sell more of the high-end MBPs
I don't use Apple software much but I understand that Xcode is Apple's equivalent to something like Visual Studio --- which takes several GB, but what exactly in Xcode needs 75GB? Does it somehow include all versions of iOS and macOS ever released?
I'd assume runtimes for various iOS systems (think 3gb for iOS 11, 3gb for iOS 11.1, 11.1.1 etc) from many many versions ago. Same with simulators. It is very very likely that he could just delete unused ones and cut it down to 20gb
My Xcode.app is 15 GB, and depending on how many different devices you connect, the iOS Device Support folder will balloon rather quickly. 75 GB sounds pretty high, though.
If you own an older MBP, you can pretty easily upgrade the SSD to bigger storage. I have a 2TB SSD in my 2012 MBP.
If you own a newer non-upgradable MBP, you can easily sell it and get an older model with almost the same features - but also upgradable - and maybe even make a few bucks.
I have not seen anything bad about the new FS, I have heard everything bad from the OS itself. I had held off of Sierra because it felt half-baked and hoped High Sierra to be a Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion/Cap, but it's really not looking good.
It does not help that I have one of the "dead dGPU" 2010 series, and with every new release I dread more and more that gfx won't be able to lock the system in "integrated only" mode.
Never had random reboots or graphical artifacts on screen before on OSX but my iMac has been very unstable since the High Sierra update. I’m lucky I’m not using that machine for work or I would be raging on a daily basis.
I’m not an “Apple are doomed”-er but this is the poorest Apple OS release since the black screen of death that plagued iOS8.
You seem to generally get about 3 years of use from an iOS device before the CPU can’t really keep up with the OS updates. I couldn’t recommend upgrading an iPhone 6 to iOS 11 as my wife’s 6 Plus has basically become unusable.
Maybe part of the problem is that no-one in Cupertino will be using a 3-4 year old iPhone or a 2012 Mac on a daily basis?
Some of your Enterprise apps (like antivirus) might have compatibility issues or straight up don't have an update available. Even these days it seems like these Enterprise developers don't start development on updates until after the major macOS update has been released to the public.
There is a problem with some third-party SSDs on certain Macs during High Sierra installation, apparently during conversion to APFS. [1] Maybe that's one concern?
A tip if you do upgrade, especially from an older macOS and you're using Apple's Mail app: back up your filters. I procrastinated and ended up upgrading from Yosemite (presumably a less well thought out upgrade for obvious reasons), and Mail helpfully deleted all of my filters. Fun times.
An automatic download that size can be an issue in certain circumstances, but why is this blogger just assuming Apple hasn’t done anything to address that? E.g., perhaps it doesn’t automatically download if you’re low on disk space. Perhaps they’ve even done something clever to determine when it might cost you download tolls and avoid it then too. I mean, if you use the internet much at all you are very likely involuntarily downloading a lot more than that in the form of ads and their associated video/audio, images, and tracking code.
At least (as the blogger mentions) it’s generally good for people to be up-to-date. It’s just reality that there are so many people who simply won’t unless it’s easy and without a little prodding.
I think people manufacture outrage at Apple for the attention it get them.
This isn't really a problem with Apple's approach here as much as using a limited cellular data plan on macOS which opens a whole can of worms since you can't easily restrict which apps, especially daemons, have network access like you (mostly) can on iOS. You also can't really restrict whether loading a simple web article these days is a 5 KB download or a 5 MB download. The desktop web is just not mindful of bandwidth costs today since most cable connections have been unlimited historically. Hopefully this is a change we see a similar simple control over in the future.
You might try something like Little Snitch if you really want to lockdown network traffic not initiated by yourself, however, there are also just so many background system services trying to use network that this can be a bit time-consuming to setup.
It has worked fine before. Most background stuff checks for updates, downloads small stuff, I figure < 500Mb a day for gmail, my git repos, checking news, messaging apps: 5.6 Gb is an obnoxious amount. Not only size, but bandwidth.
If you're really saying we should all be fine with and expect multigigabyte downloads happening at arbitrary times, without our consent, then I think we have a very different model of computing ethics.
I didn't say it was your fault — I only clarified why the expectations you have don't align with the reality of OS X, and moreover any desktop operating system, today and over the past decade.
It may be worth re-reading my comment as I'm not arguing the interpretation you described: I didn't mention ethics and only described the reality of the situation we have today and one approach for addressing it.
Good tip. It's never been a problem before, 4Gb for a few days is way more than I would normally use. Can you block the system from connecting to the Internet?
Gone are the days when Apple products used to work flawlessly.
Struggling to understand how a company nearing a trillion dollar valuation can't push out stable updates for it's platforms. Even iOS (Apple's cash now) 11 is buggy as hell.
Also regret upgrading. Loads of graphical glitches, volume controls randomly stop working, mouse slows down when taking screenshot and my laptop is absolutely crawling performance wise since updating. Worst release ever
The upgrade process itself is a little hit or miss with OSX.
I had my own personal experience with that today. In my case, the automatic installer didn't like FileVault, which rendered my mbpro a shiny brick. In relative terms, it was easy to work around in recovery mode but I can imagine the pleasure a non-technical user would feel at waking to find their beloved mac turned into a shiny brick.
I came to ask a similar question, can macOS High Sierra now be installed on a AppleRAID set? (Not sure why it is called “AppleRAID”, guess that is they brand software RAID0)
I see lots of complaints about High Sierra being buggy and pain in the butt. But I've had no such issues. Infact I've found it to be really polished and breeze(as was too be expected). So much so that I upgraded my file system to apfs. And mind you, I'm running Hackintosh. And, I seemlesly upgraded it from Sierra.
P.S. I'm sure now that I've mentioned it, something's about to go horribly wrong.
Unfortunately my mom fell for this and the upgrade did not succeed destroying her operating system install. Hopefully her documents are still there; she really enjoys looking at pictures of her kids and grandkids.
> the upgrade did not succeed destroying her operating system install.
You should use a comma there. You probably meant "the upgrade did not succeed, [thus] destroying her OS install". But without the command, it means "the upgrade did not succeed [in] destroying her OS install", which is the exact opposite.
Since I updated to High Sierra, my Java plugins in Safari have stopped working. Now those are required for VPN connection. Apple support says to re-install macOS, but I am not convinced. Also there are some weird bugs popping up.
What really rocks is the copy/paste. It's blazing fast.
Generally it’s completely safe to just reinstall OS X on top of itself, as long as you have backups. I’ve had to do it a few times over the years and without exception it has booted up correctly afterwards. But if you do power user things (custom kernel extensions, disable system protect, etc.) then of course you’re at a higher risk.
Yep, there needs to be a client side program to route all the traffic through VPN, isn't it? And while there may be better programs, Java is pretty much I know of as being used in many companies.
I'm confused, does the switch from HFS+ to APFS happen when the upgrade happens, or is it a separate step you do or not do later? My macs are on rotating HDs, sounds like some of the problems are with this.
Apple seems to suffer from cloning envy even if it makes very very little sense. It first started with iOS copying Windows Phone's look (ugh!), even if their original design was considered the golden standard and everybody was copying it. Then they adopted weird 16:9, which Google promptly used and jumped on Apple's original format. Now they took "black magic" tricks from Microsoft that had massive backslash from their userbase and MS still didn't recover from them.
This tells me that Apple's originality is now gutted, the ship is rudderless, the company went beyond "bozo horizon" and MBAs with no vision took over. Sad, but expected.
I have a Macbook that still runs Mavericks and I'm quite happy with it. I know it sounds conspiratorial but I've never been able to shake the forced obsolescence tag when it comes to Apple. I have a laptop. It works very well. I don't feel the need to upgrade or update the software, because I don't want to lose functionality that works really well for me.
Anecdote time: I skipped Yosemite altogether (had a feeling it wasn't quite ready, and the discoveryd, wifi issues etc. had me vindicated), but El Capitan was really smooth (rose tinted glasses maybe, but I remember it beating my Snow Leopard experience) and Sierra has been great from point 0.
I can't say it's going to work for your Macbook, but if it has an SSD (or you can put one in it) I really recommend trying out 10.12.6. Revert to a backup if things go awry.
I'm really sensitive to graphics issues. You never know if it's a bug or your GPU is going out. I'm not touching HS for a while.
Same here. Though El Capitan is the end of the (official) line for me (mid-2009 15" MBP). As its EOL is next year, I'll probably then install ubuntu.
I must say that I'm quite pleased that Apple still support a >8 year old machine. At least with software anyway -- asking at an Apple store last year about a replacement battery did not result in success!
The same, my rMBP still runs Mavericks and still looks beautiful (unlike the OK look of post-Mavericks OS X). My hackintoshes run El Captain/Sierra though and iOS is up to date.
My mid 2013 MBA has gone through multiple upgrades and now running High Sierra. It has i3 Core and 4GB of ram. I was afraid with each upgrade that it would run like crap. I'm pleasantly surprised that it runs HS without any perceivable drop in performance
This kinda <del>pisses me off</del> makes me a little angry. I've a 2014 rMBP and, given the issues I've heard talked about, have no desire yet to upgrade to HS. Them pulling a Microsoft and auto downloading the OS for me is consumer unfriendly seeing as how HD space on Macs cost a premium!
Good. I'm glad I'm off the ancient HFS+ now, and the newest Safari is faster and better than Chrome. This is long overdue, and while the transition has had hiccups, the longer we wait the more painful it will be.
I can live with automatic IOS upgrades, because at the end of the day, my phone will still function, even if I lose all the apps.
However, I lose my laptop ... I am screwed (I can't afford backups right now).
I also have software that I paid rather a large amount of money for (back when I could afford it) that is incompatible with High Sierra and I cannot afford to upgrade the software.
So, I'm kinda stuck between a rock and hard place here.
It is a shame to see Apple using the same tactics as iOS with macOS, which in my opinion a different beast when it comes to upgrades.
I really regret upgrading to High Sierra, because — thanks to a still unfixed graphics driver issue, my 2014 rMBP reboots/lags/breaks when using the GPU. Fortunately, I managed to remedy it with a beta Nvidia driver; without a pro-user mindset, I can only imagine how many people are frustrated by this issue alone, not to mention their apps breaking as a result of a 'forced' upgrade!
High Sierra has the same lack of 'internal polish' as iOS 11, and as a result, it's going to leave a lot of users scratching their heads in anger.
Part of me misses the days when getting an OS X update was an event that required a trip to an Apple Store to pick up (read: pay) a DVD :)
I'm having significant problems with High Sierra on MBPR 2013. WindowServer memory usage can get up to 5-8 GB before it starts to consume insane amounts of CPU and the system basically locks up and I need to reboot the system.
Also simple application drawing starts to fail too, I've encountered visual errors like this https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-2... in multiple applications, Xcode's console/stdout window breaks often. Quite interesting features for a stable release indeed.
It sounds like this has been pretty consistent, but I haven't had one problem since upgrading my late 2013 MBP. It's an i5 2.4Ghz, with 8G mem. Onboard 1500MB for graphics, no GPU.
Right now my WindowServer is only around 240 MB and I haven't rebooted in a couple of weeks. Not one visual error either.
(Memory is looking like:
) And I'm running a long-open instance of Chrome, Hyper term (Electron-based terminal emu), Itunes, Mail, Keybase, XCode, and Atom.Each time I open one of those I see a memory drop of about 1G, but I run Memory Cleaner to keep an eye on it, and running a quick flush clears up about a gig with no performance drops.
That visual issue looks extreme! I've not had a single problem besides the odd program needing updated to be able to run.
I did wait until the first official release to upgrade the OS, though. I didn't grab the beta.
Did you guys install the beta first?
This bug frustrated the hell out of me and was fortunately fixed in 10.13.1 update. There are a couple more window manager related bugs (I think), it crashes and logs me out frequently while watching videos in VLC.
I was running into a bug with Sierra where the Cocoa version of Emacs would sometimes trigger a bug in DisplayServer that made it use 100% CPU. Fortunately, that is solved in High Sierra.
Unfortunately, I have some other fun regressions:
- Preview has become pretty much unusable. It crashes often when zooming PDFs. It also often doesn't linearly go through pages/slides when pressing the down key when a thumbnail is selected.
- The other day my MacBook Pro (2016) showed the charge icon, but it didn't actually charge. I noticed when it was at 5%. Unplugged and plugged the charger and it works again.
- Keynote doesn't open (some?) presentations produced with PDF2Keynote anymore. This worked fine in the previous version of Keynote.
Confirmed fixed here on 2013 RMBP as well. Was very annoying.
It has also fixed watchdog timer firing in the middle of the night and waking up to a fresh boot.
I have a late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro and I've been using High Sierra since the GM release and I haven't seen any of those problems. No visual artefacts in Xcode, either.
> High Sierra has the same lack of 'internal polish' as iOS 11, and as a result, it's going to leave a lot of users scratching their heads in anger.
I've avoided upgrading to macOS High Sierra just to wait and see how it turns out. I'm less cautious with iOS, and am currently frustrated by two things in iOS 11:
1. The WiFi/Bluetooth radio behavior in Control Center (to compensate I use Siri to turn those off, but that's cumbersome too). The recent beta of 11.2 has a popup announcing the new behavior, and that sounds like a terrible idea by itself. Instead of giving more control to the users, Apple, for my needs, has made a terrible decision on this one. (Of course, I have read comments from other people who actually like this new behavior).
2. The bloat in the OS, which causes terrible lag in different screens (including Settings) when it's running on last year's device (an iPhone 7). I don't play games or do video editing and other activities that might need more RAM. My usage has been the same as it was on iOS 10, but the device is sometimes a pain to use. I'd expect such slowness in a device that's three or four years old, since Apple doesn't seem to optimize for older devices, but last year's device??? I've restarted the phone, reset it, updated to the latest .x version as soon as it's been released, but nothing has helped (my flash storage is less than half used - so it's not that either).
Overall, I guess I'm just echoing what some others have said over the last few years - the software quality and "it just works" mantra that Apple used to take pride in is gone. If anyone in Apple were to ask me what it should focus on, I'd suggest something like two releases on the lines of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which was primarily under-the-hood changes to optimize things and make it better and faster. I'm certain iOS needs this kind of effort badly.
FWIW, I've also provided this feedback to Apple at apple.com/feedback and I'd suggest others who're concerned or have issues do the same.
This slowdown has happened consistently in every release since iOS 6. Apple just optimizes the experience for the latest iDevices, which are always blazing fast, but then they slow down drastically as the years go by.
This is either an engineering decision (let's just focus our efforts on the latest thing) -- but then optimizing the whole iOS would speed up ALL of the devices, wouldn't it?; an economic decision justified as an engineering one (who cares about the old devices? let's just sell them a new one); or incompetence.
Seriously what are you talking about ?
Apple supports OSX 10.13 on seven year old devices and iOS on four year old devices. And the only reason they don't support it longer is because older devices aren't 64-bit. If it was an economic decision they would just match Android's support lifetimes.
Also I use a 17 inch 2011 every day and it's just as fast as it ever was.
Support and optimize are two way different things. The cynic in me says they support those old devices for purposes of getting people to upgrade so their device slows way down and they have to purchase a new one. I know I’ve been caught in that a couple times.
> echoing what some others have said over the last few years - the software quality and "it just works" mantra that Apple used to take pride in is gone
You and those people would be completely wrong. The quality has been about the same.
What you are doing is remembering OS releases when they were at the end of their cycle e.g. 10.4.11 instead of remembering them at the start. Right now we are at iOS 11.1 and OSX 10.13.1 i.e. the buggiest these releases will have ever been.
I really regret upgrading to High Sierra, because — thanks to a still unfixed graphics driver issue, my 2014 rMBP reboots/lags/breaks when using the GPU. Fortunately, I managed to remedy it with a beta Nvidia driver; without a pro-user mindset, I can only imagine how many people are frustrated by this issue alone
I honestly see why normal users never want to upgrade anything, for any reason. The first 5K iMac I used was an upgrade nightmare: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/01/5k-retina-imac-and-mac-os... . Many of the x.0.0 OS X / MacOS releases have edge-case bugs and one gets in return minimal user-visible functionality improvements. So why bother?
> Part of me misses the days when getting an OS X update was an event that required a trip to an Apple Store to pick up
Part of me misses updates like Snow Leopard where the only reason I wanted it was because it saved 7GB of HD space and improved performance. I would 100% buy OS updates that all they did was optimize existing code.
Especially since this "OS" is so far from being just that. In the tour of new features, the first 3 were about editing/organizing photos, then there were a bunch for a browser I don't use followed up by some changes to a mail client that isn't webmail.
I'm sure High Sierra includes plenty of lower-level improvements too, but I fail to see why a photos app isn't an optional add on or distinct app from the app store, especially when the OS download is over 5 GB and done in the background without asking. Maybe I'm just a purist, but I'd like my OS to focus on system stuff rather than application stuff.
> I'm sure High Sierra includes plenty of lower-level improvements too
How about a brand new filesystem?
Wow. You must have been upset for at over a decade now.
Because OSX has always shipped with applications. In fact every OS does.
After all the trouble you went through, would you really call your experience an "upgrade"? It sounds like you are barely tolerating upgrades. In terms of user experience, Apple has terrible UX because they impose on their users so much.
There is no justification for what Apple is doing. They are downgrading and arguably damaging your computer, because 1) they are too lazy to support more than one operating system, 2) they want to use you as a beta tester 3) they want to ensure the integrity of their DRM ecosystem. It is the same reason that I am coerced into installing Sierra if I want to put a video on my iPad that they forced an iOS9 update onto (I would have to "upgrade" iTunes which requires that I update the OS).
Sadly, this has become a trend.
Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less of a problem before. If you want to keep using an old Mac, there are plenty of OS install disks, copies of old shareware floating around, sites like Low End Mac which document what works and what doesn't. The hardware was also usually more repairable. I'm worried that current Macs in the age of App Store OS updates and glued battery will be rendered into expensive paperweights that much more certainly when Apple withdraws support.
[1]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.... -- "[Steve] would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party."
I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple employees tended to test on the newer Apple gear, and older models sat somewhere as part of a bulk testing unit, meaning they don't personally experience the same slowdowns as you.
Actually, Apple is extremely stingy with gear internally. Most employees complain about having to use minimum spec refurb hardware all the time.
Indeed. When I was on a six month contract for Retail Software Engineering, I observed that everyone had hardware that was at least a year or two old. I was told that the new hardware is reserved for paying customers, and if you wanted a new machine you could use your employee discount to buy one.
Otherwise, the only people who get the latest hardware are those who need to test or develop code on it, and that is a very small fraction of the total number of employees.
1) Mac supports multiple operating systems through BootCamp.
2) Apple has a beta program if you want to see what beta releases actually look like. What Apple is doing is releasing updates in a more agile fashion i.e. more frequent at the expense of longer test/fix iterations.
3) Apple has no DRM on the Mac and on iOS it isn't about rights management. It's purely about not allowing side loading of apps to ensure security and privacy.
4 There are plenty of ways to put videos on an iPad that doesn't require iTunes nor an OS update.
Out of curiosity where does one find such a driver?
Check this thread, talking about how it has been a huge headache for Electron apps. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomme...
The driver I am on is this one but it looks like (as per above thread) there could be updates. http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/126538/en-...
Disclaimer: Check your device is compatible before trying to install any drivers from the above links :D
LMGTFY:
https://www.google.com/search?q=nvidia+drivers+mac+high+sier...
The long march of OS unification across apple ecosystem is underway.
I feel like I'm seeing a trend here. An OS reaches a very stable point where users are happy. But the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse. I think it's why people were stuck on Windows XP for so long, and now Windows 7 will be the one people hold onto as long as possible (if they weren't automatically upgraded). The most recent versions of iOS and macOS are in the same boat: the feature list is uninteresting to most people, but the update is pushed on them, and there's a good change it will break your install/slow things down/break some apps. I haven't bothered updating to High Sierra, since after installing Sierra I was left wondering what I had gained. I disabled Siri after the first week of never using it.
Side note, it's annoying that Apple ties app updates to OS updates. One of the big selling points this time seems to be the new photo app stuff, like you can't just release that for everyone?
/rant
There's this other item currently on the front page, which is also relevant --- some users seem to want updates, regardless of whether it actually fixes thing for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15727749
Personally, I abhor this continuous churn too; I'm a developer myself, but I'd rather spend the time to fix small things and in general drive towards that asymptotic stability than attempt huge breaking changes in the fashionistic sense.
I used to think this way. Like downloading updates was making my computer better in mystical ways. Maybe it's just fun to get new things, even if you don't really know what they are. Years of using and developing software has given me a more pragmatic (or grumpy) outlook. It's the most annoying when something new comes along and somehow disrupts a productive workflow, I think that's why devs are so annoyed at Apple right now.
This isn’t the first time on this merry-go-round. Snow leopard to lion was a downgrade in as many ways as it was an upgrade. I also remember reluctantly trading in NT4 for W2K. OS release quality isn’t a linear progression, it’s a sine wave.
And it is a flat wave :)
Every time something improves something else gets worse.
Except in Linux and maybe mobile OSes. Latest Android or iOS is objectively better, even with things that regressed.
Linux has had its share of regressions: KDE 3-> KDE 4 and the accompanying destructions of amazing apps like Amarok 1.4. Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3. The period where Ubuntu tried to replace everything with half-baked Mono apps, etc.
I guess it just depends. I never use any of that. i3wm hides whatever current mess there is in Linux GUI land for me quite nicely.
This is a reason I enjoy Ubuntu 16.04 so much. My drivers are stable. My programs work. My UI is i3wm and isn't going to change or improve much, it has reached a near maximum efficiency level and i3 aims to be very stable and do its job and not "innovate". The laptop hardware is supported and stable, the drivers aren't changing. All systems are go.
MacOS? Always innovating with new "features" like APFS. Are they truly making the OS easier to use in some novel way for non technical users? Are they improving things for technical users? I know technology changes and APFS is supposed to make SSDs better, but... the general sentiment is just what you stated.
My iPhone 4 used to work great with a given OS. All it needed was security updates for 3+ years, instead after about 2 the latest updated was unusable. iOS "improvements" were very hit and miss. Some were good, some were not. I do not mind mobile OS improving as much though.... that hardware has still been improving rapidly offering much better features so the more rapid OS updates kind of make sense there in terms of supporting the latest hardware.
But laptops? What has changed.....
The f* touch bar? The amazing keyboard? The Retina display?
Only one of those was a real innovation and it has been supported for a long time.
/extra_rant
I'd agree with your perceived trend. Ubuntu has the right idea with the LTS releases. Microsoft had the right idea with the LTSB, but ruined it by making it limited to enterprise customers.
I hope Apple and Microsoft will start to realize many of their customers see the OS as the layer for getting things done, and not as an end to itself. Annual, or semi-annual, feature updates are not fun, waste time with a slow install, and the features are frequently unwanted. And with the lack of QA in both companies, each major update brings a whole host of new bugs.
This does make Linux appealing to me at the moment. If a major distro changes something that bothers you, you can count on someone to fork and maintain the old way. There are trade-offs of course, but it's possible to keep you system just the way you like for a long time while still getting updates where they are important.
> the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse
It isn't the company that feels the need to stay relevant, it's the UI designers & developers. They have to keep changing thins to justify their existence.
I can't wait for skeuomorphism to come back in style so we can all reflexively say "eww" to flat interfaces as being out of date.
Well considering corporations aren't sentient beings and are made up of these employees it's the same thing.
No, it's the difference between the company being relevant to the market, and the employees being relevant to the company. That isn't the same thing.
but corporations are people.
It's still about people being relevant to people. Just internally instead of externally.
If you do not want your Mac to automatically download updates:
uncheck "Download newly available updates in the background" in the App Store section of your computer's Control Panel.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207251
I found this too late--I was traveling overseas and purchased metered internet--woke up to find 5/12 GB gone...
I already had that setting disable and High Sierra Installer was downloaded automatically anyway.
The only option enable for me is "system data file and security updates".
BTW, if someone doesn't want to use terminal. It's possible to control all App Store downloads/install behavior on "System Preferences" > "App Store".
I regret upgrading. My Mac was wonderfully stable before the upgrade. Now it periodically crashes, as in full hard crash/reboot.
Sometimes it fails to recognize one of my two external monitors, and when I wake it from screen saver or screen off (energy saver, but with laptop still running), it flashes the three displays a while and fumbles around trying to decide what goes where before _finally_ allowing me to unlock. And after I unlock, all my windows have been rearranged and shoved onto one display.
I find no improvement or redeeming value in High Sierra. It's almost as bad as my new Windows 10 laptop next to it... in fact with the crashes it's now even worse.
Apple has been on the path of self destruction, dare I say, since Jobs died. He may have had some goofy ideas, but apparently his dictator like control and obsession with details was worth more than I realized. Sadly for us users, especially developers, we'll soon have no OS that works great all the time.
I experienced a similar disappointment after installing one of the Sierra security updates. It introduced some external display issues [1] which to this day have gone unfixed. I've spent hours with Apple support, both in chat and over the phone, explaining the issue and providing them with debug data. They told me multiple times it was being looked into by engineering and would continue to update me. But time and time again they would schedule a follow-up phone call that never came or tell me I'd receive an email follow-up that would never arrive.
I also echo the sentiment that it's difficult finding a practical alternative.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/277967/major-issue...
I have to say that I haven't noticed any issues so far - Firefox, VMWare Fusion, VLC, and Homebrew all work fine.
That said, I strongly disagree with forced version upgrades.
You should always be weary of forced updates. People should really know never to trust software when it tries updating.
I've been a satisfied Mac user and developer for nearly two decades.
Perhaps I'm lucky, but I never had a single OS update problem during this time. Not a one. Not until High Sierra.
This update is so bad, I'm actually abandoning the platform entirely. I've been shopping for new PC hardware since I installed this disease.
Agreed. After using macOS High Sierra for a few days, I was in shock and decided to downgrade to Sierra immediately. Downgrading macOS can be difficult, and in this case it was also necessary to restore the HFS+ file system. Fortunately, I had a good backup and enough spare time to do it correctly.
Actually, I'm starting to get tempted into the new surface book which claims to be about 2x as powerful as the latest MBP.
Given how much worse High Sierra has been for me performance and stability wise I’d be quite upset if I’d been tricked/forced into installing it.
For instance activating accessibility zoom freezes the entire system for 5-10 seconds before it kicks in. It’s horrible.
I am also regularly frustrated with file system changes taking up to 30 seconds to show up in Finder. I presume this is a side effect of APFS.
If we lay all these complaints of "the update is worse" end-to-end, from the first OS X to today, we'd get some sort of eternally crashing MC Escher OS :)
Something is absolutely not right then, because APFS is MUCH faster indexing, listing, and instantaneously showing file/folder sizes. I'm running it on an unsupported MacPro 3,1 and it runs like a dream.
You're not running it on old platter drives are you? It's made for SSD.
This is not unlike Microsoft's aggressive push to automatically install Windows 10 a few years ago.
This has became the new normal it seems. Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work (or to start it in the middle of the night and not switch it back off).
This is purely something that these companies do for their own good without any regard for the user. They probably think "What are you going to do about it? Install Ubuntu?"
I’ve had it up to here with pushy updates. Tragedy of the commons: every app thinks it’s important enough to update several times per week.
On any given day, at least one of Windows, Firefox, VSCode, or myriad other less important apps wants to update before it runs. Talk about pessimising app start times! App start time is now the time to download and reinstall!
Windows FCU silently borked 6 of my machines by steamrolling drivers I had carefully selected for stability and performance. Broke GPU and Wifi on 5 of those, and it took me half a day to figure out what changed. On my main dev machine, Windows Update got into an infinite loop of churning the disk 100% and never finishing. Every fix I tried did nothing, until finally I disabled all WU services.
So in resignation, I did install Ubuntu. And was quickly reminded why I don’t use it. Ironically, the productivity-killer there is also about updates: for any app I need to run properly, I have to update its whole lineage of dependencies, often manually, and work out which versions it likes.
So I’m reluctantly back to Windows. I’ve just changed all the update settings I can find to ask me or just leave me alone and let me get a little work done.
> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work
To play devil's advocate, the system provides great APIs for preserving work during reboots (above and beyond just saving to files, full state restoration of all UI in the system frameworks). It's arguably only poorly designed software that does not do this.
I don't fully believe this, but it's one way of looking at it. For pro users, shouldn't be rebooting, for most users, they shouldn't notice.
Applications shouldn't need to care, because the computer should not ever be rebooted for the vast majority of security updates --- the ones that everyone will be fine with (even those who otherwise hate upgrading), the ones that fix things like buffer overflows, the ones that actually matter to security.
It is highly irritating to see that the "patch" to fix one unchecked buffer copy turns out to require half a dozen whole-file-replacements and takes tens of MB, when ultimately only a handful of bytes needs to be changed. Perhaps these companies should learn from the crackers and reverse-engineers and make patches that are actually patches: find and modify the appropriate bytes in memory, and also the file on disk. Those who have used crack/noCD/etc. patchers will know how fast and painless the experience is. The changes are instant and persistent, with no disruption at all.
If such a system was used, I would guess that security updates may, instead of the hundreds of MB or even GB they take today, and take tens of minutes or more to install (not even counting the productivity lost by the obligatory reboots), only be MB at most --- with the majority being several KB, install instantly, and present absolutely no disruption.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923
drpm files on Fedora 25+ spring to mind, along with jigdo and zsync (Debian, Ubuntu - for full isos). I'm sure they will get there, but then perhaps different installs have a different set of files that need to be replaced?
> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work
This is something I've found fault with in Windows, and was greatly disappointed to see happen in Sierra.
I had been getting the High Sierra update reminder notification once a day for several days and normally just clicked "Remind me tomorrow" (since there's no option for "Don't remind me"). One day after having it pop up, I instead clicked "Try in an hour".
I expected this to ask me again in an hour, at which point I would choose whether or not to proceed with the update. Instead, while my MacBook was asleep with work open, it went ahead and updated the OS without my consent.
I don't (think) I lost any work, as I typically save things and Vim didn't leave any swp files. But the experience was disconcerting and bitterly reminiscent of Windows...
Do for their own good? I see this as for the collective good, as most of the people hurt by unpatched software are NOT microsoft but people, small businesses, and the victims of the resulting botnets.
Obviously if you know what this is you can turn it off.
The decision should ultimately be up to the user.
This sort of subtle authoritarianism in the name of "security" is quite frankly extremely disturbing, and the companies are using it to force what they want by bundling plenty of other highly disruptive and completely-non-security changes too. I could go into a more political direction here, but looking at some of the other changes that have happened to society in general lately, I'm not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.
I mean, I’d rather just not have internet connected devices at all. But the internet is a commons, and people who don’t patch ruin it for everyone.
But, there’s a difference between auto update by default and forced updates. And there’s, again, the option of buying the same thing with no internet connection—pretty much nothing you own needs to be connected to the internet at all.
The issue with having an off switch is that non-tech-savvy people will blindly follow some instructions to disable it and will get caught by a major security vuln.
Case in point: when Chrome throws a TLS error, you could type "danger" to bypass it, but they had to change it because businesses started teaching users to bypass errors blindly.
Not exactly apples to apples, but similar enough in my mind. If users blindly disable updates, they won't be updated when there's a major security patch.
A good reminder that if a software company is given enough trust to auto update, keeping that trust us important. Seems the big boys have been breaching that trust a lot lately.
This is true. But i’m ok with stupidity hurting individuals—at least in terms of compromise—i’m less ok with default settings being potentially insecure one day.
I don't like the pattern Apple is using there. But comparing it with Microsoft?!?
Microsoft was a lot more aggressive and shady, and used a bunch of evil UI patterns, like installing it by clicking "Cancel" button. Or displaying a second start button that opens the shady installer instead of the start menu. macOS auto downloading is not right, but it is whole level below that.
If you look at OS charts like on Steam, 64% still on Win7, many reverted back, because Win10 (29%) is shit and full of dark patterns, and Win7 is the new XP. In the last few months the install base of Win7 increased whereas Win10 decreased (I was one of them). http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc and https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-7-user-base-on-steam-con...
No, it’s the same really. Automatically downloading I’ve 5GB of data in the background without permission is some incredibly shady shit. There are people in Australia with data plans that this would literally still cost hundreds of dollars.
I often use my laptop with my mobile hotspot when I'm outside the house, and 5GB of data would cost me $50. Which is more than Apple used to charge to buy a MacOS X install DVD. Most months I only need $5 - $10 of mobile data.
(Side note: I had no idea you can still buy Snow Leopard DVDs from Apple! Costs $30.99 including shipping:)
https://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-...
Gosh, I miss Snow Leopard now. The best OS Apple ever did, IMO. Super stable and totally about "getting shit done." In the years I was running it, I don't ever remember my system crashing.
The difference is that the App Store Control Panel on the Mac allows the user to make the decision that updates should or should not be downloaded in advance of the decision to install the update.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207251
With the Windows 10 update, Microsoft was actively using dark patterns to circumvent their user's wishes.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/67367/upgradegat...
Downloading in the background is not the same as installing without warning. Yes, Apple should make the install notification more clear to prevent users from clicking blindly. That’s not the same as surreptitiously tricking users (it is possible to decline the update on macOS). These are separate griefs.
I live in Spain and I have a data-limited connection as well. I use Little Snitch to stop unwanted background downloads.
There is an option to disable the automatic downloads in System Preferences -> App Store.
“For the greater good” seem to be the answer for these aggressive moves from tech companies.
I beg to differ. Microsoft used underhand tactics to force Windows 10 on users, where at one point closing the upgrade prompt window by clicking the X at the top-right was taken as permission to install. The difference between Windows 8.1 and 10 was marked, particularly because when Windows 10 was first released it was extremely buggy, and the in-place installation broke swathes of drivers, programs and lost settings. (At least, this was my experience as the person called to fix such problems).
I understand that you have never used Windows, but the x at the top right means close that particular window and not yes or no.
>Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/67367/upgradegat...
Would you please not be so rude with other users? We're trying to have a discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This article complains that clicking a button that says "install" starts installing.
Complaint is more about unprompted 5.3GB download.
I'm not upset with any one device because I'm sure they all have an option to disable auto download. But there is now so much auto downloading that goes on in my house (I can think of 15 devices top of my head) that my wifi often can't reliably stream Twitch or YouTube.
I think I'm at the point in the tech story of my home that I would love a UI that shows total and per-device usage history. With knobs to throttle each device on a temporary or permanent basis.
I’ve got a Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite as The Router for my house. Not sure if it does exactly per-device but if you enable it, it can show traffic per host/ip, site ‘category’, etc. It’s quite a nice little piece of kit.
Speed-wise,it’s also very good. It’s plugged in directly to my FiOS and I’m maxing out my 150/150.
Their APs are very good as well. Blazing fast, quick to set up, easy to manage, and they come out of the box with absolutely everything you need for any kind of mounting or installation.
After getting so frustrated with really expensive consumer WiFi routers I finally decided to give Ubiquiti a try. I purchased an Edge Router Lite and a dual channel AC Pro access point for about the cost of a nice consumer model.
It took all of 10 minutes to get everything plugged in and configured and every WiFi issue I had in my house disappeared. I was immediately pissed at myself, why the heck did I resist the jump for so long?
Bonus points for the APs being POE, makes it a lot easier to put them on the ceiling, and more bonus points because I have not reset my router in 18 months.
Yeah, I'm seriously considering replacing my pfSense router and repurposing the hardware as a Plex client.
How is it possible to tell what category a piece of traffic is?
Depends on which categories you want to have.
You can use the TCP port (http vs bittorrent vs email, or individual games which often use a well-known port for communication), deep packet inspection (eg. to distinguish between normal web and HTTP video streaming), reverse IP lookups to detect location of the remote endpoint or what company it's assigned to (through AS number for example).
My router does it with a comprehensive list of (sub)domain => category. It may not have anywhere near 100% precision, but for the sake of what this subthread talked about, it good enough to know who eats your bandwith and for what.
Your router doesn't show this? It should also have throttling and QoS options. If it doesn't, investigate buying a new router.
If it's a few years old, you may want to also verify that it can actually route fast enough for your incoming pipe.
Google wifi has this, you can only do it from the app though.
The upgrade to 10.13.1 has effectively locked my SSD in read-only mode because reading from it would always cause an APFS kernel panic (both under 10.13 and 10.13.1) also making it impossible to boot from it. It took me several hours to figure that out and to restore my data. I now downgraded to 10.12.6 and I am not missing anything. I think I am going to switch to Ubuntu as soon there is a comparable laptop to MacBooks from ~2015 (perhaps in 1-2 years?). This kind of nonsense is just not worth my time and money when I just need Firefox, ZSH and Emacs anyway.
Try out a Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
I also don't like how much they are pushing for me to install IOS 11 on my 5S. I know it's going to be unbearably slow but I intend to keep this phone for another year, so I want to stay on IOS 10
I have a 5S and iOS11 actually improved my phone's performance. The biggest hurdle for me was adjusting to the UI/UX changes.
I actually had issues with iOS10 where my phone was consistently full no matter how much I removed from it. I had to remove almost everything to upgrade, but once I did it had cleared up most of the memory on my phone. The OS took up more space, but it seemed to have optimized whatever excesses were consuming everything before.
Were you on 10.3 before? The most likely explanation of what you saw is the APFS migration, but you should have already gotten that in the 10.3 update.
Interesting point. I was, but not for very long. I was on 10.2 for the longest time. In the process of upgrading to 11, I upgraded to 10.3 for a few hours and didn't notice, but I didn't clear out as much from my phone until I moved to upgrade to 11, so I can't confirm one way or the other.
I can say I've noticed an improvement in performance overall, though. And at the very least, it hasn't slowed down or run into any major bugs.
You intend to use your phone for a year without installing any security updates?
Some people like living dangerously, I guess. For the rest, it's a good thing iOS strongly encourages people to keep up to date.
What about folks who continue to use older hardware?
This is a problem with the manufacturer, that doesn’t backport security fixes to older OS versions.
It’s a sign that we are still in the software dark ages when security is so poor that a continuous stream of patches is the only way to stay safe.
It will only change when all software vendors become liable for security failures.
So... what's the alternative? How do you address security vulnerabilities without pushing out a change in the code that patches the vulnerability?
It would be a good thing if iOS was stable as it should be. iOS 11 is a buggy mess that I regret updating to.
I'd rather miss out on few security updates for a year, than have my phone completely freeze, require reboots, etc quite often - and this isn't even an old phone, it's 7+. And let's be honest, the security issues aren't even that easily exploitable or can be mitigated some other way.
I will never again update macOS and iOS until at least few months, and newer fix versions, after release - I've had nothing but problems with both.
I have a 6s and regret upgrading to 11. Slow and unstable. Frankly I don’t do enough sketchy crap on the phone to care about security updates as much as I’m supposed to.
It always amazes me how subjective adjectives like "slow" and "unstable" are when referring to software. I too have a 6s (plus), and iOS 11 has been just as fast and stable as iOS 10 in my experience.
This kind of disparity makes a lot of sense in the PC world, where everyone has slightly different hardware. I can't quite figure out why it's still common on a platform where there is relatively no hardware variation.
I mean if I had devices side by side of different OSes, I’m confident I could measure it. Time to open applications, like the phone dialer and messages, is noticeably slower than ever before for me. Another issue is that now when I open my recent calls, it shows a cached image of its last state for a few seconds before it refreshes with the most recent state. Unfortunately, in those few seconds, I usually already clicked the contact I wanted to call back, only to see the screen refresh after my click and find out I’m calling someone I did not mean to call. This is the same annoying way that Safari treats the back button, but I’m sad to see that pattern creep into other apps. I’d rather see a loading screen than a false view.
I keep screenshots of battery use in iOS. I went from 10.3.3 to iOS 11 when it was available. Gave it the obligatory 3 days to "stabilize" and was amazed at how crappy it was. Given my usage I was seeing about 4.5 hours Usage at the 50% mark on 10.3.3. On iOS 11 it was down to 3.25 hours. I tried all the Public betas up to 11.2B1. I DFU'd. I set up as new. I ran without my usual assortment of apps and just used the stock ones. I jumped through every single hoop I could and iOS 11 was just a downgrade for me.
Sketchy crap like checking your mail?
Or like using Wi-Fi, given that iOS 10 will not be patched for the KRACK vulnerability.
It's also good for Apple's pocket. It's really good for them when people have to buy a new phone just because the old phone is extremely laggy after a mandatory update.
Apple should be legally required to maintain the same level of functionality as before then.
I don't agree with that but they shouldn't be allowed to stop signing the old versions. People should be able to downgrade if they have a need or desire to do so.
There has to be a middle ground. If I want to run iOS 10, I should get a set number of years (3? I'd be happy with 3) Apple will back port security fixes to it instead of being forced to run the dumpster fire that is iOS 11. Simply continuing to sign old versions or make them available isn't enough.
Hopefully the EU takes this up, as they’re far more pro consumer than the US.
> I know it's going to be unbearably slow…
It's apparently a bit slower[1], but fine. And iOS 11 will see more optimization love in subsequent update.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/ios-11-on-the-iphone...
It's still completely illogical to install an update just to wait for another update to fix the problems introduced by the first update.
For sure, and I don't personally recommend that anyone jump on a dot-0 release of anything. But Apple aggressively attacks dot-0 bugs — iOS 11 is already at 11.1.2[1], and I'm running an 11.2 dev release that's been nicely boring for me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_11#Updates
I have a 5S and recently had to upgrade so that a vendor would provide technical support. They stated they only provide support for their application running on the latest version of iOS that Apple supports for your device.
I had held off and finally upgraded as the app is fairly important to me and I wanted to get the issue resolved.
Now input is 10+ seconds lagged, everything is significantly slower and apps frequently run out of memory and I end up at the home screen.
Unfortunately the iOS upgrade didn’t fix the issue and I’m still dealing with the vendor.
If you keep enough media on your phone so that free space < space required for iOS update, it won't be able to download the update or nag you about it. If it has already downloaded an update, delete it manually, then copy more media to your device.
But that would be detrimental to the performance of an SSD, no?
Not sure, does Apple overprovision iDevice SSDs to save the user from manually managing free space? iOS11 update is around 2GB, so 1.9GB free space will be enough to block the download.
The sibling posts seem to have had a better experience, but iOS 11 slowed down my beloved 5s to the point where I had to give up and order an iPhone SE. Apple wins again... Maybe that won't be enough though, as opening the camera can take 10+ seconds even on my iPad Pro.
I haven't been unpleasantly surprised by an iOS upgrades in the past, despite what I've heard. This one does sound particularly warty though, so while I'll install 11 eventually i'm waiting for them to advance a few minor versions.
Funny, my 5S still insists that the latest version is 10.3.3 when I check for updates.
5s? You peasant! Off with your head for speaking in this forum.
* WARNING *
I upgraded at launch on my Mac Pro with an OEM Apple RAID card.
The installer will update your firmware then install. After install it won’t boot.
Turns out they forgot to put the drivers in for the Apple OEM raid card. High Sierra cannot see any drives attached through the card.
Apple claims to support these older Mac Pro computers for this upgrade but can’t give me an eta for when they will add support back in.
If you have an older Mac Pro your system will be bricked by this upgrade.
The entry model of MacBook Pro comes with just 250GB, I personally struggle to keep 30GB free (I need to have Android SDK and iOS SDK installed)
When having less than 20GB the OS gets slow, so I usually run DaisyDisk to find what can I delete, I didn't like to find the high sierra installer there.
On the side note, I didn't update to High Sierra because it seems that there are issues with XCode 9 (slow simulator) so I can't risk.
The mistake here is to use an entry-level model for development ;)
Even though you were downvoted, this is a valid observation. You don't need 250GB of space to watch youtube / netflix or surf social networks or send emails or use iMessage or any of the basic tasks that most people use computers for. The large size of Xcode definitely helps them sell more of the high-end MBPs
My Xcode install alone is 75GB
Apple still sells a machine with a 128GB drive
I don't use Apple software much but I understand that Xcode is Apple's equivalent to something like Visual Studio --- which takes several GB, but what exactly in Xcode needs 75GB? Does it somehow include all versions of iOS and macOS ever released?
I'd assume runtimes for various iOS systems (think 3gb for iOS 11, 3gb for iOS 11.1, 11.1.1 etc) from many many versions ago. Same with simulators. It is very very likely that he could just delete unused ones and cut it down to 20gb
Xcode itself is ~5gb I think. Or 10.
My Xcode.app is 15 GB, and depending on how many different devices you connect, the iOS Device Support folder will balloon rather quickly. 75 GB sounds pretty high, though.
If you own an older MBP, you can pretty easily upgrade the SSD to bigger storage. I have a 2TB SSD in my 2012 MBP.
If you own a newer non-upgradable MBP, you can easily sell it and get an older model with almost the same features - but also upgradable - and maybe even make a few bucks.
Our IT dept just sent us an email NOT to upgrade if OS asks. Wonder if the holdout is the new filesystem or something else?
I have not seen anything bad about the new FS, I have heard everything bad from the OS itself. I had held off of Sierra because it felt half-baked and hoped High Sierra to be a Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion/Cap, but it's really not looking good.
It does not help that I have one of the "dead dGPU" 2010 series, and with every new release I dread more and more that gfx won't be able to lock the system in "integrated only" mode.
Never had random reboots or graphical artifacts on screen before on OSX but my iMac has been very unstable since the High Sierra update. I’m lucky I’m not using that machine for work or I would be raging on a daily basis.
I’m not an “Apple are doomed”-er but this is the poorest Apple OS release since the black screen of death that plagued iOS8.
You seem to generally get about 3 years of use from an iOS device before the CPU can’t really keep up with the OS updates. I couldn’t recommend upgrading an iPhone 6 to iOS 11 as my wife’s 6 Plus has basically become unusable.
Maybe part of the problem is that no-one in Cupertino will be using a 3-4 year old iPhone or a 2012 Mac on a daily basis?
Some of your Enterprise apps (like antivirus) might have compatibility issues or straight up don't have an update available. Even these days it seems like these Enterprise developers don't start development on updates until after the major macOS update has been released to the public.
There is a problem with some third-party SSDs on certain Macs during High Sierra installation, apparently during conversion to APFS. [1] Maybe that's one concern?
[1] https://blog.macsales.com/42466-a-note-on-high-sierra-compat...
A tip if you do upgrade, especially from an older macOS and you're using Apple's Mail app: back up your filters. I procrastinated and ended up upgrading from Yosemite (presumably a less well thought out upgrade for obvious reasons), and Mail helpfully deleted all of my filters. Fun times.
This seems reasonable to me.
An automatic download that size can be an issue in certain circumstances, but why is this blogger just assuming Apple hasn’t done anything to address that? E.g., perhaps it doesn’t automatically download if you’re low on disk space. Perhaps they’ve even done something clever to determine when it might cost you download tolls and avoid it then too. I mean, if you use the internet much at all you are very likely involuntarily downloading a lot more than that in the form of ads and their associated video/audio, images, and tracking code.
At least (as the blogger mentions) it’s generally good for people to be up-to-date. It’s just reality that there are so many people who simply won’t unless it’s easy and without a little prodding.
I think people manufacture outrage at Apple for the attention it get them.
They haven't.
I moved house three weeks ago, and was using a short-term cellular internet connection to stay in touch with emails, update version control, etc.
The automatic download blew through all my bandwidth, and I needed to top up.
I was able to control other downloads, no ads no video, etc. But I had no clue what had used all my bandwidth until it was done.
This isn't really a problem with Apple's approach here as much as using a limited cellular data plan on macOS which opens a whole can of worms since you can't easily restrict which apps, especially daemons, have network access like you (mostly) can on iOS. You also can't really restrict whether loading a simple web article these days is a 5 KB download or a 5 MB download. The desktop web is just not mindful of bandwidth costs today since most cable connections have been unlimited historically. Hopefully this is a change we see a similar simple control over in the future.
You might try something like Little Snitch if you really want to lockdown network traffic not initiated by yourself, however, there are also just so many background system services trying to use network that this can be a bit time-consuming to setup.
:D - My fault, of course!
It has worked fine before. Most background stuff checks for updates, downloads small stuff, I figure < 500Mb a day for gmail, my git repos, checking news, messaging apps: 5.6 Gb is an obnoxious amount. Not only size, but bandwidth.
If you're really saying we should all be fine with and expect multigigabyte downloads happening at arbitrary times, without our consent, then I think we have a very different model of computing ethics.
I didn't say it was your fault — I only clarified why the expectations you have don't align with the reality of OS X, and moreover any desktop operating system, today and over the past decade.
It may be worth re-reading my comment as I'm not arguing the interpretation you described: I didn't mention ethics and only described the reality of the situation we have today and one approach for addressing it.
https://www.tripmode.ch/
It's $8, but has saved me so many times from blowing through data quotas.
Good tip. It's never been a problem before, 4Gb for a few days is way more than I would normally use. Can you block the system from connecting to the Internet?
Gone are the days when Apple products used to work flawlessly.
Struggling to understand how a company nearing a trillion dollar valuation can't push out stable updates for it's platforms. Even iOS (Apple's cash now) 11 is buggy as hell.
Also regret upgrading. Loads of graphical glitches, volume controls randomly stop working, mouse slows down when taking screenshot and my laptop is absolutely crawling performance wise since updating. Worst release ever
Seems too early. My laptop wouldn’t reboot until I unplugged my external miniDP monitor.
If the rollouts anything like the utter debacle that was iOS 11, they shouldn't be forcing major OS updates down peoples throats.
The new normal sucks.
Yeah, let’s break everyone’s Thunderbolt external monitor support, not just a few people. Enjoy the video corruption on external monitors my friends.
The upgrade process itself is a little hit or miss with OSX.
I had my own personal experience with that today. In my case, the automatic installer didn't like FileVault, which rendered my mbpro a shiny brick. In relative terms, it was easy to work around in recovery mode but I can imagine the pleasure a non-technical user would feel at waking to find their beloved mac turned into a shiny brick.
Still waiting for Dark Mode on Mac OS. My eyes bleed with the white interface and Notifications bar being white!
Have they fixed RAID1 on the Mac mini server? Last time I looked it wouldn’t install.
I came to ask a similar question, can macOS High Sierra now be installed on a AppleRAID set? (Not sure why it is called “AppleRAID”, guess that is they brand software RAID0)
Looks like not based on recent comments on https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/78908
I see lots of complaints about High Sierra being buggy and pain in the butt. But I've had no such issues. Infact I've found it to be really polished and breeze(as was too be expected). So much so that I upgraded my file system to apfs. And mind you, I'm running Hackintosh. And, I seemlesly upgraded it from Sierra.
P.S. I'm sure now that I've mentioned it, something's about to go horribly wrong.
Unfortunately my mom fell for this and the upgrade did not succeed destroying her operating system install. Hopefully her documents are still there; she really enjoys looking at pictures of her kids and grandkids.
Apple seriously needs to take heart of this message: https://youtu.be/e_hnG7kuam8
> the upgrade did not succeed destroying her operating system install.
You should use a comma there. You probably meant "the upgrade did not succeed, [thus] destroying her OS install". But without the command, it means "the upgrade did not succeed [in] destroying her OS install", which is the exact opposite.
s/command/comma/
Since I updated to High Sierra, my Java plugins in Safari have stopped working. Now those are required for VPN connection. Apple support says to re-install macOS, but I am not convinced. Also there are some weird bugs popping up.
What really rocks is the copy/paste. It's blazing fast.
Generally it’s completely safe to just reinstall OS X on top of itself, as long as you have backups. I’ve had to do it a few times over the years and without exception it has booted up correctly afterwards. But if you do power user things (custom kernel extensions, disable system protect, etc.) then of course you’re at a higher risk.
> my Java plugins in Safari have stopped working. Now those are required for VPN connection.
Is it common for VPN access to be handled this way?
What's the advantage over issuing a certificate or just using a username+password?
Yep, there needs to be a client side program to route all the traffic through VPN, isn't it? And while there may be better programs, Java is pretty much I know of as being used in many companies.
I'm confused, does the switch from HFS+ to APFS happen when the upgrade happens, or is it a separate step you do or not do later? My macs are on rotating HDs, sounds like some of the problems are with this.
It happens automatically as a part of the upgrade.
http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sier... According to this, SSDs are converted automatically, HDDs are left at HFS+, and with some command line magic you can get the installer to not convert SSDs.
Apple seems to suffer from cloning envy even if it makes very very little sense. It first started with iOS copying Windows Phone's look (ugh!), even if their original design was considered the golden standard and everybody was copying it. Then they adopted weird 16:9, which Google promptly used and jumped on Apple's original format. Now they took "black magic" tricks from Microsoft that had massive backslash from their userbase and MS still didn't recover from them.
This tells me that Apple's originality is now gutted, the ship is rudderless, the company went beyond "bozo horizon" and MBAs with no vision took over. Sad, but expected.
still having graphic errors on 10.13.1 with Intel HD 5000 graphic cards in fullscreen quicktime videos on external monitors: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/70jaci/this_has_star...
My MBA is still on 10.10 with no intention of upgrading. It has an almost full 64 GB SSD, so I hope that will stop an automatic update.
I have a Macbook that still runs Mavericks and I'm quite happy with it. I know it sounds conspiratorial but I've never been able to shake the forced obsolescence tag when it comes to Apple. I have a laptop. It works very well. I don't feel the need to upgrade or update the software, because I don't want to lose functionality that works really well for me.
Anecdote time: I skipped Yosemite altogether (had a feeling it wasn't quite ready, and the discoveryd, wifi issues etc. had me vindicated), but El Capitan was really smooth (rose tinted glasses maybe, but I remember it beating my Snow Leopard experience) and Sierra has been great from point 0.
I can't say it's going to work for your Macbook, but if it has an SSD (or you can put one in it) I really recommend trying out 10.12.6. Revert to a backup if things go awry.
I'm really sensitive to graphics issues. You never know if it's a bug or your GPU is going out. I'm not touching HS for a while.
Thank you for your suggestion. My next upgrade will be an SSD. With 8 gigs of memory it runs surprisingly well for a 5yo laptop :-)
El Capitan here on a Mac that won't install anything higher, everything still runs great
Same here. Though El Capitan is the end of the (official) line for me (mid-2009 15" MBP). As its EOL is next year, I'll probably then install ubuntu.
I must say that I'm quite pleased that Apple still support a >8 year old machine. At least with software anyway -- asking at an Apple store last year about a replacement battery did not result in success!
On the same machine here. Still chugging along. Grab a battery from OWC/Macsales.com
The same, my rMBP still runs Mavericks and still looks beautiful (unlike the OK look of post-Mavericks OS X). My hackintoshes run El Captain/Sierra though and iOS is up to date.
Then you are missing years of security patches. Your call there but... seems like a risk
Which is better: vulnerable and usable or less vulnerable and less usable?
There's one element there that might be missing: Vigilance. Vulnerable, sure, but with great care it can be managed.
I do update the security updates. Some years ago apple decoupled those from the OS updates.
My mid 2013 MBA has gone through multiple upgrades and now running High Sierra. It has i3 Core and 4GB of ram. I was afraid with each upgrade that it would run like crap. I'm pleasantly surprised that it runs HS without any perceivable drop in performance
On High Sierra, is anyone else having TextEdit freeze-crash every time you try to save?
This kinda <del>pisses me off</del> makes me a little angry. I've a 2014 rMBP and, given the issues I've heard talked about, have no desire yet to upgrade to HS. Them pulling a Microsoft and auto downloading the OS for me is consumer unfriendly seeing as how HD space on Macs cost a premium!
Joke's on them! I'm still using Mountain Lion!
If Microsoft had done the same (downloading 5.21 gigabytes of software without asking the user) everybody would have lost their mind. Just saying.
Good. I'm glad I'm off the ancient HFS+ now, and the newest Safari is faster and better than Chrome. This is long overdue, and while the transition has had hiccups, the longer we wait the more painful it will be.
I can live with automatic IOS upgrades, because at the end of the day, my phone will still function, even if I lose all the apps.
However, I lose my laptop ... I am screwed (I can't afford backups right now).
I also have software that I paid rather a large amount of money for (back when I could afford it) that is incompatible with High Sierra and I cannot afford to upgrade the software.
So, I'm kinda stuck between a rock and hard place here.