How did Disk Utility.app go from being one of the great built-in OS X utilities to the embarrassing amateurish shit show that it is today?
Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application.
Spend 5 minutes with the app and you'll find a half dozen bugs and amateurish mistakes. It's baffling, and it's been a problem for two years now.
There have been a few cases like this. Presumably the original was created/maintained by just one person, they move on, and then when the next person comes along they decide it's easier to re-write than modify the old code. But they don't have sufficient time and the new version is inferior to the old.
Bear in mind the old version did need to be updated (new CoreStorage features, has to handle Fusion drives, now APFS).
I get the sense there's a lot of shuffling between teams in Apple, and teams are a lot smaller than you'd expect, and this is the inevitable result. The advantage (I'm guessing) is that they get to move quickly, and it reduces bureaucracy/politics, but ... yeah, this isn't great.
At least diskutil is still there, and is as powerful as ever.
I was just reading about something similar in the "Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?" post
Joel Spolsky's point: They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
> Statements like that, while powerful are dangerous as they turn into baseball bats for people to hit each other with.
I love that analogy.
I see it again and again with so many of the "classics" - phrases like "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and "adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later". Sure, these statements are right more often than not, but the zealousness with which they are often applied leads to an enormous amount of mistakes.
There ARE cases in which optimizations aren't premature. System architecture is all about designing a system for optimal performance in some area or another. And in some cases, bringing in more people to a late project can speed things up.
I reject that comparison. This is not rewriting a core product with tens of millions of lines of code. This is a small utility program. It's very often no problem to just make a new utility program. Especially one that's in the single digits on how many coder-months it costs.
Yeah, I can see how a rewrite makes sense. It's not rewriting diskutil itself, it's adding a new UI, that presumably uses newer APIs that will be easier to maintain in the future.
The problem really is that the new Disk Utility is a minimal viable product, rather than an app that can actually do everything the diskutil command line utility can do.
And then you have terrible bugs like this, which is presumably a non-security engineer writing a bit of UI code that they shouldn't be. I doubt this bug actually came from the APFS encryption itself.
From the people I know at Apple, there are lots of HUGELY talented people there. That said, they're bigger than ever, and I'm sure there are plenty who are just hiding out trying to while away their career. And some teams are much, much better and more highly responded than others.
I wonder if they just don't have enough power users of the OS left that aren't also just developers using CLI? ANY power user of the OS itself has seen a ton of head-scratching changes over the years, and I figure that the product managers just don't know who the features were for or what they're used for.
Is there a reason that the macOS CLI can't be intended as a general power-user feature, not just a developer feature?
Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true?
Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades.
I would bet Apple just thinks the CLI is the optimal Human-Computer Interface for doing some things.
> And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades.
CLIs are opaque by definition. With a GUI you can click around menus until you find what you're looking for; with a CLI you can't even begin unless you already know what you're doing. Man pages are no help to newbies; they're either uselessly terse, impenetrably jargon-packed, or both.
It's probably possible to make a CLI that's relatively easy-to-use and newbie-friendly, but I've never seen anyone attempt it. People used MS-DOS for years because it was the only way to access the large majority of software, and abandoned it as soon as there was a viable alternative (Win9x).
I would argue that small command-line tools "the unix way" combined with a competently written -h help page is quite discoverable. Maybe not for a general computer newbie, but certainly for people used to /other/ cli tools.
This only seems to work in practise for tools that are very small, otherwise exceptional writing is required (which, by definition, will rarely occur). I can't imagine (to pick a particularly extreme example) that anyone has ever learned to use git by reading the man pages.
In contrast, even features in pretty poor GUI apps are by default generally discoverable.
I shudder to think how hard it would be - likely impossible - to use a bad git GUI if I didn't already know many of the git CLI commands.
Even just, say, MS Word. If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. For both CLI and GUI, Google or official docs are the only reasonable way to discover.
> If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere.
I find that clicking around through menus often teaches me about great features I didn't even know I wanted.
Regardless of the cause, in practice, I find that it's much easier to get basic functionality out of a new-to-me GUI app than a CLI app. That may not be a fundamental properly of CLI, but it certainly is how all significant CLIs are written.
The ssh man page is truly awful. I managed to read through it multiple times without finding the functionality I wanted, even devoting special attention to a section that turned out, later, to be purportedly "documenting" exactly that functionality.
This is why I usually only use man pages to reference a command-line option or as a quick reference. If you're new to a tool, a quick web search finds a much more informative tutorial which saves you time, despite being more verbose.
Quite. And surely this is how pretty much everyone gets started with things like git?
Conversely, novice use of even complex GUI apps rarely requires looking up a tutorial first, because you generally can just click or tap around and at least figure out minimally how to use it.
Inexpert users (ie. nearly everyone) stop there. Obviously further reading is needed to make more extensive and/or efficient use of any tool. But at that point in my opinion we're beyond the reasonable boundaries of 'discoverability'
For svn and specifically git GUIs with lots of options and insane defaults, I usually do not have a fcuking clue what exact command will yet another cool wrapper execute and how it will report back. Too many times I fought the result of people clicking around and completely messing the repo with no idea what they’ve exactly done. So, our company has a simple but strict rule: you’re allowed to update/pull/commit/push via gui, but nothing more and never touch any checkboxes in there.
If you can’t spend time on one of your main tools docs to grasp what “merge -r 403:480 -c -473 ^/branches/rt0” does and how to command it, then sit there and code, folks will do maintenance for you.
The parent was about discoverability -- you've argued that discoverability isn't necessarily useful for tools where people need to have some idea of what the tool is doing. There are many tasks where the user needs to have an accurate mental model and a grasp of the details. I completely agree with that.
Still, GUI programs are very clearly more discoverable than cli ones. How far and where discoverability is the best approach to educating a user is a separate question.
>where people need to have some idea of what the tool is doing
Not exactly. Wrappers can (and tend to) “enhance” and hide details from those who actually have idea. This kind of breaks discoverability into confusion, that’s what my rant was about.
When MSDOS was in active use computers in general were used by a much smaller section of the population. That could well be because many people didn't get on with a CLI and Macs, at the time, were really expensive.
To counter that with an example of what I consider really good man pages look git.
I've learnt loads about rebasing, etc. from the examples in the git man pages.
I've always thought of Apple as one of those black holes that absorbs devs: people land there, and then—if they can hack the culture—tend to stay for their careers.
Is this not true any more? Where does ex-Apple dev talent tend to go? (Microsoft? Indie app development?)
I worked at Apple as a developer. I just went to another company just like everyone else does.
I know lots of people who have spent their entire careers there because the work is challenging and interesting. I also know teams that handle anonymous backend infrastructure e.g. AppleID or ADC where there was higher turnover.
Honestly all the great apple devs from the early 2ks have either moved into consulting or entrepreneurial activity or, more likely and worryingly, they've been promoted into management roles at apple where they're managing a team of engineers not quite as good as they were. You see this everywhere, at every company. That's my guess.
The talent pool of engineers capable of propelling a company technologically forward the way Apple was "back in the day" is by definition very shallow. He's not saying engineers are better, it's just a selection bias.
Nah. It’s a bug in a critical security system that made it to release. It should have been caught by automated testing—can you grep for the password, or decrypted volume encryption key, in an encrypted filesystem? When you change the password, does anything change other than the encrypted VEK? It shouldn’t!
These are in the first page of tests I’d write. NIST SP 800-111 asks for forensic pre-release testing—can you really believe such happened here?
This isn’t a failure of the engineer who wrote out the wrong buffer. Everyone makes mistakes like that. It’s a failure of the Engineering culture and engineering management that shipped without reasonable testing, or manual pre-release examination. It’s a failure of the culture that accepted bugs like this, rather than asking (appropriately, for an Apple FDE product): let’s assume that it will cost someone $1B or a thousand lives if this fails. What should we do to assure its correctness?
I opened the App Store just now to see if a few lack-of-polish bugs were present. The screen flickered a couple times and then was nothing but white and a loading spinner. Waited 30 seconds, never went away.
Force quit, reopen, loads fine.
Go to the Today tab. Scroll through. Notice that sometimes your scroll doesn't get registered. Why? Because if you try to scroll over an "Open" or "Get" button, it steals the event and breaks your scrolling. Amature mistake, and the kind of detail Apple used to always get right.
Watch OS SDK: When the user performs an action on a notification that arrives on the watch, it calls a callback on the application on the phone. What happens if the user's phone is not reachable? The action just gets dropped on the floor, and to the user the app looks buggy. (Maybe/hopefully this is fixed in the latest version of watchOS; I haven't checked.) Flawed, poorly thought out API design.
Go to the updates tab on the App Store app. Pull down to refresh. No updates, but the "Available" headline disappears and then weirdly reveal-animates back into place, an overall feeling of flicker.
Huge issues? No, but a very real drop-off in quality and polish from what Apple used to put out.
(The password bug is a little different -- obviously bugs can and do happen. But not having a testing procedure in place for the core paths through a piece of software is a huge process failure, especially for something critical like security. Every release of the software should have testers going through a plan like, "enter password hint. attempt to access volume. verify password hint is correctly shown." &c.)
(Also, to be fair, I think after taking a huge dive the quality of Apple software seems to be slowly ticking up again.)
I really don't get why they have allowed this crippled GUI for so long. I understand that they want to make it simple for low level users, but that seems like a bad excuse in this case as low level users aren't even going to use Disk Utility, just like they aren't going to use Automater. It shows a blindness to their market, i think. Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac when it's time to upgrade. The tech support is night and day, and problems are easy to fix thanks to built in, easy to use screen sharing, a robust OS, and well rounded modern hardware. At the same time I'm not a unix guru, I don't know Bash that well and when I'm forced to use it I spend a lot of time reading. I hate that they keep hiding more and more commands behind Bash precisely because it makes it significantly more difficult to do what I'll call "prosumer IT". One of the things that really sold me on Macs was when Disk Utility managed to repair a USB that was completely bricked on my windows machine. As of MacOS Sierra, I now have use bash to fix corrupted drives as they aren't displayed in the GUI. Such a pain and such a step backwards.
There are times that installing macOS requires a trip through Disk Utility, is why. Disk Utility.app is basically made for the single use case of "modify the system to make macOS installable."
The thing to understand, is that everyone inside Apple uses diskutil(8), not Disk Utility.app. diskutil(8) is the "canonical" way to do almost everything related to Disk management on macOS, the same way diskmgmt.msc is on Windows. Everything else is a secondary "convenience" view to just allow certain workflows (like installing macOS without overwriting things, or unlocking a FileVault volume with a master password to install macOS on it) to be accomplished more easily—like the Properties view of a disk drive in Windows.
If there are other "convenience views" of disk management that you think would be helpful, why not make them into an app and sell it? One my favourite macOS programs, DaisyDisk, is basically just such a convenience view. People are willing to buy these—especially as a gift for their "prosumer" friends. Apple can't predict every use-case that a prosumer might want an accelerator for, but the free market probably can.
> I really don't get why they have allowed this crippled GUI for so long.
You explain it perfectly yourself:
> Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac when it's time to upgrade.
As long as you still prefer Macs over anything else, Apple has no incentive whatsoever to be any better. They merely have to be just good enough for you not to switch and keep using macOS/iOS/etc.
The old version of Disk Utility must have been pretty nasty to justify a full rewrite. I remember it getting quite unreliable at some point around 10.7 when with reading/writing disk images. Partly because the UI relied on non-obvious drag & drop / modifier key mashing to do certain things and it didn't have much error handling to clearly explain what went wrong. It wasn't even that good at explaining what operation you were about to perform. The new version (supplemented by using diskutil for advanced stuff) is an improvement in my opinion.
One of the most-common complaints that I see about Apple is that they have allowed macOS' quality to steadily decline and the most-common speculation has been that this declination in quality is because macOS makes Apple less money than iOS.
The iOS-using products are Apple's cash cow. It does make sense that they'd prioritize working on iOS. However, what doesn't make sense is that Apple certainly has enough resources to work on both OSes. It's not like they don't have enough money to hire good developers.
That is the complaint, however. It makes some sense, except that Apple could easily afford to invest in both macOS and iOS.
Manglement seems to have collectively forgotten that iOS app quality is dependent on macOS and tooling quality. Improve macOS, you put a lightness in devs' steps everywhere and iOS apps get even better.
It seems that macOS has gotten completely bogged down (like really, really bogged down) and mired in bureaucracy.
What I just described is a "little thing" that's very very hard to quantify to non-engineers, sadly.
(I recently learned (I have no exposure to Apple, I'd like to but their stuff is expensive!!) that you can't just "go ahead and upgrade Xcode", but that you have to do it in a very specific/esoteric way or you break absolutely everything, and that it's not unreasonable sometimes to just nuke macOS from orbit and green-field reinstall everything.)
MacOS is a dead end, iOS is clearly where Apple is converging and you'll shortly see ARM laptops from Apple shipping iOS. It's only a matter of time before their flagship productivity-oriented products are running iOS.
iOS' stability and quality have declined as well. I've encountered a number of glitches and bugs on the iPhone that I don't usually expect from Apple.
Some of them are sloppy glitches in functionality or display, others have to do with poor stability (force closing more often). Never encountered any of these issues on iOS a few years ago.
It looked like an eager bright eyed bushy tailed summer intern did it in their spare time to impress their manager who had never heard of this Internet thing before, but who then couldn't get the rest of the company to buy into this weird TCP/IP thing, because it was distracting customers from using LocalTalk like they were meant to. But then they shipped it anyway, but never updated it after the intern left at the end of summer.
I get the same vibe from the current Terminal Preferences Profiles dialog, whose window you aren't allowed to resize, and which has the fixed size scrolling list of configurations, fixed width run command input field that doesn't let you see the whole command and makes it hard to edit, and many other cramped fields, whose labels are all clipped and scrolled, even when you click on them to edit the labels.
Why the FUCK does anyone (ESPECIALLY Apple) use tiny fixed sized windows jam packed full of cramped tabbed and sub-tabbed dialogs with nested vertically scrolling lists of horizontally scrolling text fields, in these days of gigantic screens?
Yup. Same deal with the side panel in service preferences. The only way to even see the full name of a service beyond "[Thunder...thernet]", if it's longer than about 10 characters, is in the title bar of the Advanced settings pane.
It's the iOSification of OS X. Sadly the whole OS is going in that wrong direction. I would like to know how many folks are working on MacOS vs iOS. Would put things into perspective.
Hard to imagine that anyone at Apple sees MacOS (or the Mac in general) as a promising career path. All the 'A' players are either working on the iOS platform and devices, or have cashed out completely.
Especially with the move toward forced open-plan workspaces in the new campus, I suspect Apple is going to have serious problems attracting and retaining key talent in the years ahead. They are reaching the point where stock options will no longer be a strong incentive due to lack of upside potential.
That’s funny. Disk Utility is the successor to Disk First Aid, which has been available since the mid-80s. It’s not the iOSification; it’s deep Mac tradition.
More evidence supporting this: the new Disk Utility.app seemingly has absolutely no way to recover from a fusion drive being split up into an HDD and SSD (made a mistake partitioning it) -- you have to do it from the command line.
On the contrary, I booted the exact same machine into internet recovery (which gave me the Mavericks-era Disk Utility.app) and it literally had a huge warning that the fusion drive was partitioned incorrectly, and a repair button.
Why remove important features that still (have to) exist in the underlying utility? Like this is literally an operating system designed to run on only a handful of hardware, which is why people like it.
That fucking pie chart partition allocation bullshit. Christ almighty.
The pain it inflicts upon me... Ever since that thing appeared it's been horrible. It errors if you look at it wrong, and who knows what it's really doing?
The lack of attention to detail by Apple recently e.g. code reviews, in house testing is clearly too low. I have seen too many software failures recently from this company. Like photos freezing on my new iMac (before High Sierra), numerous issues with iOS (I remember the podcasts app wasting all my cellular allowance because it ignored WiFi only) and other nuances, inconsistencies and defects.
Only in iOS 11 have they added tags to the files app - the previous iCloud Drive app had a button for tags but it was seemingly not implemented.
Finding issues in apple products is really like going hunting in a zoo at the moment.
I have a Dell Precision laptop running Linux at home and a MacBook Pro from work.
On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep. The App Store is some horribly wrapped, unresponsive web app. Disk Utility is useless. Etc, etc. It's a horrible mess of an experience.
The Dell running Linux is far more stable. I can get literal months of uptime out of the Dell using it on a daily basis w/ 100% hardware functionality. No stereotypical Linux desktop pains. And this is coming from someone who was an Apple fanboy for 10+ years. Apple's QA just went to shit and I was sick of dealing with their bugs.
Edit: For those telling me it's a hardware problem: it's possible, but I've had similar experiences w/ the wake-from-sleep issues on two different copies of the 2016 15" MBP, and the Time Machine corruption on a MBP and an Air. So if it is a hardware problem, then their hardware QC is as bad as their software.
2015 Dell Precision M6800 issues (all non-linux-related have been replicated by >=1 coworker):
Spurious thermal throttle activation occasionally reduces performance to molassas
Bluescreen in network drivers ~ once a week
Unless you disable integrated/discrete graphics switching, it fails to recognize external displays
HDD makes strange grinding noise every month or so, but hasn't failed yet.
Shit control loop on fans sometimes causes them to repeatedly pulse on and off
Shit battery / power management (about ~1.5hr tops after incentivized settings optimization)
Shit trackpad
Takes ~1 minute to recognize new USB HID devices (might be AV's fault)
(Linux-only): latest stable ubuntu toggles backlight on/off at 30hz
(Linux-only): ancient supported ubuntu doesn't support modern chrome or firefox (!)
(Linux-only): able to wake from sleep exactly once
(Linux-only): massive pain in the ass to install drivers on supported ubuntu (directions for the packager app were out of date and incorrect to a degree that was difficult to work around)
2013 MBP:
Dead key, replaced keyboard (cost: $10 + two hours)
Spill caused unreliable trackpad, replaced. (cost: $30 + two hours)
How did you get the MBP trackpad replaced for $30 and in 2h? I have the one in my MacBook Air in a similar state and Apple quotes 150+ EUR and leaving it for one week at their tech support...
I have the newer M5510 and haven't run into any of those issues. HiDPI screen works fine with Gnome scaling, touch screen works, no noises possible from the SSD, fans scale up & down appropriately, battery isn't as good as the Mac but I haven't optimized anything on Linux and it's still several hours, backlight works fine, etc. That's all on the latest release of Fedora (26 IIRC).
The land of PC hardware and Linux support is highly model/version dependent.
It sounds like you have a hardware problem with your Mac. Time Machine and wake from sleep could be signs of bad RAM...maybe the audio problem, too. Or maybe the extra stuff your work installs? In my experience (for all platforms) that software is low-level and of dubious quality.
OTOH, as long as your hardware is decently supported, I haven't really had fundamental complaints about desktop Linux in the 10+ years I've used it full time. It sounds like for certain laptops there has been good support for a couple years.
Typically, I'll get about 30-100 days of uptime on my mac laptops (usually a software update or installing a kernel extension). On my Linux desktop or server it'll be closer 100-300 days (again, usually kernel patches). Working with OpenGL heavy software, once or more a year there will be a bad combination of Nvidia drivers and kernel that could cause your desktop to crash during certain operations.
The audio issue only happened to me on one copy, but the wake from sleep and TM issues have happened on multiple MacBook Pros, both with & without the work bloatware. I'm inclined to blame those on bugs in macOS.
Are you using it in clamshell mode? Where you keep the lid closed and use an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse (you mentioned mbp and macbook air in your post). If so, I have heard about multiple problems like sleep/wake and cooling issues across multiple models and multiple OS releases. That is a specific use case I've heard avid mac users complain about over the years.
I did encounter corrupted Time Machine backups when I set up my own network Time Machine Server in Linux (using netatalk). When my laptop would go to sleep in the middle of a backup over wifi the whole backup would get corrupted. I haven't had that problem since I switched to using Synology as a network Time Machine server (I never had it happen when using a USB Time Machine backup, either). I've never used a Time Capsule.
Sadly, comparable PC laptops are following the same trend. (this could be like the headphone jack, where Apple leads the way and others follow even if consumers aren't happy). The other week I was looking at alternatives to a 13" MacbookPro that were known to run Linux well. My shortlist was a Dell XPS 13 and a Razer Blade Stealth--both have soldered on RAM (I was also looking at Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga and Dell Precision 7xxx, but I never got far enough to see if they had replaceable memory).
> On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep.
No defense to Apples SW problems, but it sounds like you may have a hardware problem. You should take your computer into Apple and see if you can get it fixed or replaced.
I don’t get why engineers let a broken setup hinder them for long periods of time and don’t do a simple google search and spend five minutes fixing their machine. None of your problems you listed are things “broken” and Apple is ignoring, shit happens and sometimes you need to fix it. If you can’t be bothered, take it to the Apple store or give it to your work IT person.
I used desktop Linux for 10 years, and finally I switched to Windows in 2015 because I was tired of "a simple google search and spend five minutes fixing their machine".
At a certain point, you want things to just work out of the box. You want to outsource the mental effort and time required to "just search and fix".
Yes, that’s a great argument for Linux, but much less so for macOS. Apple and Microsoft are roughly comparable these days (and that’s not a compliment to either), but after many years of “next year is the year of the Linux desktop”, Linux is still a pain to install on most consumer hardware in comparison to either macOS or Windows.
Nope, Linux is much easier to install on most consumer hardware compared to macOS. The latter is only easier on the minority of models made by single vendor.
> The latter is only easier on the minority of models made by single vendor.
And it's only "legal" on the minority of models made by a single vendor. That doesn't make it any less relevant that for the intended environment for it to be installed on, it's far easier.
So if only Linus would threaten you with a lawsuit for installing it in a model not designed explicitly for it, then Linux would be a much better system than it is today, right?
If there was a single high end mainstream laptop on the market which had comparable full hardware support of everything on the machine as macOS does to a MBP, then you could say something, but alas there isn’t and likely never will be.
Please, enlighten me as to how I can keep a MBP from freezing when I open the lid. Or from corrupting my Time Machine backups. Or how I can fix the fact that their applications like Disk Utility and the App Store suck.
As the two issues (outside your subjective opinions on apps) you mentioned don’t happen to anyone I know, the answer is fixing whatever you broke obviously... :eyeroll:
Ditto. Our cheap Linux and Windows machine computers are far more stable than our MacBook, which has become a paperweight used to run only one application
My mid-2011 MacBook Air with 4 GB memory has been running really well. Occasionally Safari (the Metal version in High Sierra) gets slow, but it's still faster than Chrome. I've been using it for general casual computing and machine learning development with Jupyter Notebooks and haven't run into anything that would make me want to switch. I'll probably upgrade to a 2018 MacBook Pro with 8 GB memory when those come out.
Same. This machine still gets daily use in my house.
The next laptop will not be a Mac though. Both the hardware and especially the software has gotten progressively worse to to point where it's not worth it anymore.
After my previous MacBooks became buggier and less responsive after updating, I decided to abstain from updating altogether. I'm still on El Capitan, and while there are some bugs and rather baffling programs (z.B. the updated Disk Utility), they are far and few between compared to the High Sierra experience on my other computers. Perhaps you could consider downgrading?
That's not really a sustainable solution, though. At some point, 3rd party developers quit supporting old systems and Apple quits issuing security patches.
It depends on what you do. I have a friend still happily running SL. He's curious about the new version of Lightroom, but still using the old version just fine.
Every time I had these issues with corrupt Time Machine backups the destination drive had bad blocks. If you have the right drive/interface combination you can use an application called SMART Utility by Volitans to check on that. Time Capsule drives need to be put in compatible enclosures.
I would be suspicious of any drive that has even one bad block.
So true. My experience was that upgrading Apple OSes was a safe and reliable experience. I'd almost always upgrade on launch day or the day after. As of the last 2-3 releases that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Their quality assurance has decreased so much that, for productivity sake, I just can't risk it.
After the debacle that was the Sierra upgrade (we had all of our users get locked out of their machines after the upgrade reboot and countless issues with Wifi), I'm hesitant to think about High Sierra or iOS 11.
Apple's reputation for high prices was always offset by high quality. If they keep skimping on the quality side, I'd imagine their leverage on the pricing side is going to get hurt (eventually).
After upgrading to High Sierra and running into issues ranging from freeze ups to terrible bugs in the apps I use for work, I will never upgrade immediately after a launch again.
When I see that a major software release is published for general use I used to assume that it was solid and that the general public was not being used as guinea pigs.
Oddly Sierra has been the easiest MacOS upgrade I've ever had. Barely noticed it other than having to rerun xcode-select --install; even some of the obscurer libraries I'd installed are still working. (I haven't moved to High Sierra yet.)
I totally concur with that last comment. I had to reset my iPhone 7 plus and watch series 3, twice over the weekend to get the Activity app to sync properly. Which is a shame considering Apple's reputation for building "air-tight" software and products and not rushing features to market because they want to get it "right".
It's because of the iPhone-ization of all of its products. Making hardware changes and releasing software updates yearly is going to take a very long time to stabilize as a practice.
Event with all of their employees, they can't truly make a unique premium product every year.
If you look at the release schedule of macOS, it hasn't been that much different. There is a major update every year to every 1.5 years and patch updates every 2 months. A difference in 6 months in a release schedule doesn't matter that much if you manage how much goes in a shorter release cycle.
'If a hint was set in Disk Utility when creating an APFS encrypted volume, the password was stored as the hint. This was addressed by clearing hint storage if the hint was the password, and by improving the logic for storing hints.'
Keep in mind that this only happens if you turned it on using Disk Utility. If you did the normal upgrade (the vast majority of users) you didn't go through disk utility, and everything's fine (presumably). Still a terrible error, but affects far fewer people than your comment implied.
It's rather frightening that a bug as serious as this one got past Apple's QA. It seems like the list of known problems with the new Disk Utility is growing - recently there was a submission about how High Sierra's Disk Utility did not show unformatted disks.
I wish they'd spend some time testing font sizes in macOS. I'm either going blind or the font sizes on macOS, especially things like tab titles, are getting harder to read.
Aren't these font sizes modifiable in Accessibility? I've turned on things like contrast and reduced transparency just to make it easier to read, and I'm very young.
The accessibility options do help some but I don't know of anyway to increase the font size. It become a weird mix of fonts that are either way too big or way too small. I use RDM to switch between different scaled resolutions depending on what I am doing to get readable text these days.
It clearly shows that a public beta with lots of volunteers cannot replace a small group of employed testers going through a list of user stories, verifying everything works as intended.
I like the aviation mind set on mistakes: accidents are thoroughly investigated, the aim being to find out what happened and how, not to pin blame. Then, when facile "explanations" of human error are floated, the investigation goes beyond that and examines how the whole system (training, management, SOPs, organisational structure, etc.) allowed the error to happen and, in particular, to escalate into an accident.
Mistakes happen, inevitably – a good system will catch them early enough.
One of our rules for all learning reviews after an incident: "Plan for a world where we are all just as stupid as we are today"
An action item to fix something can never be "don't make that mistake again." You have to make a change to the system to find and prevent the error, not a change to the people in the system.
Sadly, errors like this are usually symptoms of organizational problems. Code cleanliness, testing and QA, are all very easy to sweep under the rug, and neglect/abuse organizationally. In the short-term, everything still seems fine. In the long run, problems like these keep snowballing. Once a trend like this starts, the only way to reverse it is via organizational shakeups.
I hope I'm wrong, and that a bug like this happened purely due to dumb luck. But somehow, I'm doubtful.
Without knowing the circumstances of how the bug was introduced, and the testing infrastructure, I'm torn. On the one hand, I could be convinced that some believable scenarios exist where test might have missed this through something other than incompetence and sloppiness.
OTOH, I'm having a hard time imagining what that "believable" scenario might look like. You hand me Disk Utility to test, and I'm going to do some exploratory testing to cram some large strings in both fields, yada yada, we all know the drill. You know, take a moment or two before hitting the code editor. I'm just grasping to figure out how I wouldn't find this bug in like five minutes. And that's before formal tests start getting written. There's missing a bug, and then there's "maybe testing software isn't for you".
In summary, I very much want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here, but I'm sure having a hard time of it.
I think that bug could easily slip through once, even with a test script. Let’s say the script says
- enter P as password
- enter H as hint
- click “OK”
- unmount the disk
- mount it again
- check that the dialog shows the hint H
- enter P as the password
...
Now, if P isn’t obviously a password and H isn’t obviously a hint (let’s say P is ‘foo’, and H is ‘bar’), it takes only one slip of the mind to turn that “check that the dialog shows the hint H” into “check that the dialog shows the string you just entered as hint”, and from there, it’s only a tiny further slip to “yes, that’s a string I just entered”.
To me, it seems at least as likely that that gets past a tester once as it is that a programmer writes that bug.
It still should be highly unlikely to get throug multiple rounds of testing by multiple testers, though.
A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk.
A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk.
Maybe I expect too much, but a tester with any experience is going to use strings like "thePassword" and "theHint" to reduce those brain farts. One doesn't have to test software very long before discovering why using "test", "test" as the respective strings for that dialog will bite you.
I agree with your hypothesis, but it's one of those mistakes I'd expect out of a fresh-out-of-college person, and I would expect those folks to be testing, say, TextEdit and not security-sensitive pieces. But there are so many unknowns that I still reserve judgement. I'd just like to know what piece of the process broke down such that something like this gets out the door.
I agree it shouldn’t happen, but in this case, the programmer presumably made (more or less) the same mistake, writing out a variable called password unencrypted, possibly after copying it to a variable or structure field called passwordhint.
On a more serious note: this really depends on the person in question. Not everyone has that state of mind it takes to be extra wary when you find yourself in a similar situation where it went worng before. I've worked with people who made pretty severe mistakes, were pointed out, nodded 'yes', only to just make the exact same programming mistake a few months later. And again, and again.
Agreed - something I've personally seen drive such a thing in some people are plans/checklists/etc (nothing wrong with having these) where the recognition of severity is overriden with checking as many boxes as possible in an 8hr day as is required.
You can be sure that whomever was involved with the bug will probably never make that mistake again.
We all like the story of "just spent a million dollars training you", but experience tells me that there is absolutely no assurance whatsoever that any random person won't be repeating that mistake in the future.
EDIT: and to be clear, of what tiny bit I know, I blame test more than dev. From the dev side I can see someone making a stupid mistake (that for the record I could just as easily make) swapping the foo with the bar, or some mis-click in IB. But I'm still astounded that this made it out of test without getting caught.
They asked for new leadership, not new developers. The 'mistake' wasn't a bug in XYZ, but a leader who took feature deadlines ahead of actual functionality. That leader should be axed - that's what GGP was discussing.
If this happened because of a single person's mistake, that's an organization flaw. No individual should be punished for this. Instead, the process (or lack thereof) that led to such an awful bug being shipped should be identified so that something like this does not happen again.
Apple needs some internal competition, iOS and macOS should never have been merged into one team. macOS needs a leader that doesn't believe desktop computing got superseded by mobile.
I whole heartedly agree. I would like at least one desktop platform vendor to not start with the defeatist mindset that Web / Mobile won. Desktop is where I do most of my productive work, the basic way I do my work (programming / research) has not improved in a long time. There is tremendous room for innovation on the desktop.
Somewhat yes but there is also a risk of too much divergence (e.g. the similarities in frameworks are what make development great in some respects). I would structure it so that the internal cross-platform app groups have a lot of “pull”, ensuring that both OS teams continue to communicate and keep the APIs similar.
Software issues among all of Apple's products have become much more numerous in recent years. I don't want to get down voted for putting the blame on Tim Cook, but I do not believe he has been a positive influence on the quality of their software.
It's sad, really. My first Mac was a late 2009 MacBook Pro. I remember craving the machine before I finally splurged. After I bought it, I used nothing but a Mac for the next 6 years of my life. Those 6 years were some of the happiest times I've ever had using a computer. Everything worked flawlessly. The build quality of the machines I bought was pristine.
At the end of those 6 years my MacBook was getting buggier with each update, as was my iPhone. I ended up buying a Surface Book. I'm back on Windows for the first time since XP, and while I'm sure I made the right decision, I can't help look back 5 years ago and think that maybe the golden age is over.
I agree with the assertion of Tim Cook being a negative influence on Apple. Their product reveals just don't feel stunning anymore. I used to be enamored by their product lines, and truly envious of those people you knew that used Apple products for as much of their production pipeline as possible.
But it's so much different now. It feels less like a well crafted experience and more just an alternative. It was always an alternative, but a complementary one at that. You could buy a hammer, but you could also buy this nice, shiny, beautiful hammer, weighted perfectly to swing like an extension of your arm, etc.
I started getting this feeling right around the first iPhone release after Jobs passed away. As much as I romanticized it here, I wouldn't exactly call myself an Apple fan, nor a Jobs fan, but the sort of impact and hype he could build felt a lot more exciting than Cook for me. And that kinda sucks because I know Apple has some great people with even greater ideas.
I didn't want to believe that the loss of Jobs' would change much, but sadly time has shown otherwise. I miss the days of the annual iPod lineup, where each year would bring some totally new, radical design even though last year's was stunning and enough to last at least 2-3 years as the flagship model. The ever-changing iPod Nano lineup is clearest to me.
When Jobs' was asked why he would change something that was already above and beyond anything else on the market, his response was "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
The Password got written in plain text on disk. It can possibly be recovered by some obscure technique (wear leveling reserve I'm looking at you) and should be considered burned.
I made the jump off of HFS+ a few months back, as soon as I heard a new FS was coming. After years of keeping TBs of data on Mac OS on HFS+ as a home file server, I was just completely fed up. My external volumes were dead without a Mac. Nothing can read them, without paying for special software, and even that doesn't work correctly.
Now, I know there are many things that can read HFS+ in Linux and Windows, but none of them cover 100%. Sometimes you can't write, sometimes you can't mount on boot, other times you can't rely on it as a long-term solution.
I spent weeks copying everything over to a NAS, and I have never looked back. Apple should have gone with ANYTHING open source, or even remotely open standards, but it seems like the lesson they've taken from Jobs' legacy is "be different for difference's sake."
I know they've open sourced the iOS kernel, but that's because it doesn't matter. It doesn't keep you locked in, like XCode keeps you locked into Mac desktops. The Apple world went from innovating in UI and design, to innovating in supply chain management and pricing structures.
”Your password might be displayed instead of your password hint if you used the Add APFS Volume command in Disk Utility to create an encrypted APFS volume, and you supplied a password hint.
Changing the password on an affected volume clears the hint but doesn’t affect the underlying encryption keys that protect the data.”
They go on to advise users to do a backup, format, restore cycle.
I guess they are that paranoid because the old password may have been leaked, and, with it, the attacker may have recovered the encryption key for the volume. Or is something else going on?
They also advise (rightfully so): ”If your disk password for any affected encrypted APFS volume is the same as the password that you use for a macOS user account or an internet service, you should change the password of the user account or internet service”
It does seem like there are a ton of really huge bugs in recent OSX and iOS releases. I just got bitten hard by this bug with dashes in iOS: http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/26/tips-turn-off-ios-... -- I've been writing an academic article on my ipad pro, and I just realized that the damn thing ate a ton of my text---whenever the "smart capitalization" feature sees something that looks like an em dash, it inserts a null byte and blows up the end of the string.
How did this thing get through testing without anyone ever typing an em dash?
How is this obscure, and why do they have to mention it's a "BUG"? This is a support article for how to fix the issue. There's no reason why the article needs to say "Hey this is a bug", because the whole reason the support article exists is because of the bug.
So should Security Bulletins released by Apple and Microsoft not state that a vulnerability/exploit was found since stating how to fix it implies that one existed?
This support article speaks mostly to people who have already seen the symptoms of the bug. It doesn't do anything to inform people who may still be affected but haven't noticed it yet.
If we're bashing Apple's engineering quality, have no further look than the Apple Music App on Android.
Some examples:
* App crashed for no apparent reason multiple times
* Bug where on multiple occasions music won't be added to my playlists
* Bug where music not downloading after pressing the cloud icon. I always have to press it twice before the download begins, which seems like an obvious bug
Like, these are features that should be nailed down. I developed an android app which did file downloads. Press the button and download begins or is queued. Will tell users that the download fails, which is better than nothing.
Since this thread is broadly about Apple losing its edge as a fairly secure-by-default platform:
I installed Windows 10 on a computer and use it from time to time and the built-in anti-virus and malware protection makes me feel more comfortable running unsigned applications on Windows than I feel running them on OSX.
I find myself wishing that Apple would take similar responsibility for security (virus, malware) threats. One possible reason Apple is not doing this is because the next iteration of MacBooks will run iOS and unsigned apps will not be possible without jailbreaking.
Doing that on MacOS would be the death of it. Apple does have the audacity to move towards that direction (OS X already makes you jump through a few hoops with downloaded unsigned apps) but even they know that a lot of their users are developers who need that freedom.
I could see XCode and Command Line Tools becoming apps. And Homebrew could be an app that let all of its contents run in a sandbox and not touch any of the device's other data.
Apple has repeatedly said iOS and MacOS serve two different purposes. So, while I firmly believe we'll see Macs running Apple processors, I do not believe we'll see them running iOS.
I so wish Apple had not removed the older Sierra installer from the Mac AppStore... I need to update some machines but High Sierra does not seem ready for reliable use yet.
I know it's not helpful at all to your current situation, but this vicious cycle with proprietary OSes was one of the most beneficial thing we got when switching my dev shop to Linux. You can install a release from the late 90s if you really want to (not recommend tho lol). Nobody can ever take it away.
I just wish they had made APFS optional for SSDs (as it is if you install to spinning media). It seems like 99% of the problems I'm seeing reported for High Sierra are due to the filesystem (or apps using a brittle, hand-rolled method of disk access).
I don't understand why Apple can't just make the past few releases of OS X available to anyone who needs it. It's a free OS now, and it has tons of hardware checks to prevent it from being run on non-Apple hardware.
I don't understand their need to remove/hide the OS upgrades. I have to repair a friend's older MBP next week, and now I need to jump through hoops to get a legitimate installer.
If you fall more than 1 version of OS X behind and they remove the previous upgrade, you're screwed from upgrading to the latest version.
"macOS Sierra or later doesn't appear in the Purchased tab. Instead, use the Search field in the upper-right corner to find and open the App Store page for the current version of macOS."
Thanks a bunch! I downloaded and stashed a copy of Sierra when it first came out, but I recently bought a new Mac that came with Sierra (likely a point release and 10.12.0 likely won't install). I can restore from a netboot, but like having something I can put onto a USB drive.
You've missed the step of looking in the hidden purchases tab. If Sierra was downloaded previously, it is going to be there. There won't be a need to get copies of the software from elsewhere.
In App Store go to Store -> View My Account -> Hidden Items/Manage.
Depending on how old the OSX currently running is, some features (especially integration into other Apple devices, like unlock with watch or seamless switching to AirPods) are unavailable, but would be available in Sierra.
I think encryption uses a generated key to encrypt most of the disk, and stores that key encrypted with the user password on the disk. That makes changing the password fast; they only need to re-encrypt the encrypted key with the new password, and write it out. Problem is that an attacker who knows the old password may already have decrypted the generated key, so they can decrypt the encrypted data from the raw data, even after the password was changed.
Erasing generates a new key for the data. I think it could be done without reformatting, but they still would have to read each block, decrypt with the old key, encrypt with the new, and write back the result. Testing the recovery procedure for that (how do you know where to restart that after it crashed?) would be a challenge, though.
This is called using a KEK (key encryption key) to encrypt a DEK (data encryption key) or a FEK (file encryption key), depending on the exact purpose.
As you point out, erasure can rotate keys. What Apple apparently didn't provide was a straightforward way for key rotation as a key management function. This surely appears to have been rushed to market.
That can’t be the reason. If you _change_ the password (and use good passwords that are not correlated with each other), an attacker learns nothing from being able to read your old password.
The key is also stored on the disk, encrypted with the password. So presumably an attacker reading the disk could recover the encrypted key and the password and use those to recover the encryption key, which they could then use to decrypt any un-erased fragments of files they find on the disk.
Or something like that. It's an admittedly implausible scenario, but good security is not based on "meh, it probably won't happen". Of course, a much more plausible scenario is password re-use.
Apple Computer has always been a pioneer on the cutting edge of accessibility and ease-of-use.
I'll bet it will even read your password out to you with the speech synthesizer, clearly and unambiguously spelling out each of the upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols.
I have a number of friends who use OSX and Windows, and keep telling me "just give up on Linux (or FreeBSD) and use something which Just Works!"
Well, except for stuff like this. Or the built-in advertising. Or the VBA code that beachballs in Excel Mac but not Excel Windows. Or the buggy, crashy drivers. Or the awful printing experience. Or the ability to reliably predict behaviour when plugging in external monitors or projectors. Or ...
I _think_ what most people mean by "Just Works" is "I don't have to edit configuration files in order to set up my system", not "my system is reliable and predictable."
They train their Apple store staff to speak in a similar manner, to play down any problems and try to sidestep aknowleging that there is a fault with the product.
I would guess that the bug was in the front-end code for the password form. At that point the code obviously has access to the plain text password. I’m imagining a copy-paste bug like this:
Yes, I was first flabbergasted too but as miserably tested the APFS encryption interface needs to have been (if at all?!), this seems to be basically what is going on.
It's actually not a very good point because NSSecureTextField inherits from NSTextField and it's specifically designed not to protect from programmatic access to the text.
Of course, you can argue about the design but it's still not a dynamic vs. static type issue.
I didn't have Objective-C in mind, more Haskell or so. My understanding is that you could design things such that it is quite a bit harder to make such an error. I might well be mistaken on that, but at any rate, Cocoa/Obj-C/Swift specifics don't defeat the argument I had in mind (though not written down :-)
1. Lack of automated unit tests covering the code in question.
2. Lack of automated functional tests running through scenarios of setting up an encrypted volume with or without a hint.
3. Lack of strict review process for the disk utility's codebase.
This assumes automated tests are also peer-reviewed.
1 - 3 won't guarantee a bug-free project, but I doubt this bug would've made it into production.
1-2 kind of require having a proper UI testing framework in place. And when you have that for your platform that you want people to develop for, surely you would release it. I haven't seen any of that.
I’m sure the approach to dealing with this will be some variation of restorative justice instead of a public pillory and termination of an entire team like Steve did to the MobileMe Team.
If you don't want to reformat (and you aren't re-using a password you've used elsewhere) you can change the password:
1. Open Disk Utility and select the volume
2. Select File, Change Password
3. IMPORTANT: If on High Sierra GM, leave the hint field blank. If you've installed the update then you can provide a new hint.
Word of warning: the most secure course of action is to follow the instructions in the linked support article.
As there are a few mac gurus on this thread - an OT question... colleague has 2014 rMBP and used HDMI out and a DVI adapter via thunderbolt port to have two external displays.
Sierra update killed that - only one display will work at a time.
prams zapped, settings fiddled with, cables tested in millions of combos and even playing with AppleGraphicsControl.kext
Any other ideas? Seems nuts an update can kill such a thing!
One plausible reason is that they’ve already released a 10.13.1 beta, announced features and API changes coming in 10.13.1, and started revising documentation to reflect changes introduced in 10.13.1, so branding today’s update “10.13.1” would result in a nontrivial amount of extra work and confusion, in exchange for...what, exactly?
The updated version does come with a new full App Store installer and build number (17A405), however, so it’s as easy to install and identify programmatically as a new “point release” would be.
I have a MacBook Pro, and the keys no longer work reliably. I also barely get 2 hours of battery life.
High Sierra keeps restarting by itself.
They removed the jack, and all ports from laptops.
They placed the charger for their wireless mouse under the mouse so you can't use it while charging, and the list goes on and on--particularly with software.
It's just not premium stuff anymore.
I've already switched to Android, and I am not buying another computer from them.
> I have a MacBook Pro, and the keys no longer work reliably.
I have the 12" MacBook and the keyboard is absolutely miserable. I seriously got warned by the Apple Store when I bought it that if I got any dust on the keyboard at all that the keys would get stuck, which is totally unrealistic. It turned out to be true, which has meant I mostly just don't use a laptop anymore, as the keyboard is just so unpleasant. I have had it on my todo list to move all of my data back to my now-repaired 11" MacBook Air (which had a totally reasonable keyboard), but that entire task is just so depressing. A few days ago I was talking to someone I know who loves their 12" MacBook and how they find the keyboard just fine... and then he seriously told me that some incredibly large percentage of the time his O key doesn't work and I'm just sitting there totally dumbfounded wondering how he could even use such a machine.
This High Sierra bug is bizarre and disturbing. But Apple would have to commit an act of outright betrayal (such as lying about FaceID off-device storage) before I would consider going back to Android. Not because I think there is concerted malice by the Android overseers (partly because that kind of control doesn't really exist as it does with Apple), but because the potential for negligent design to cause damage seems so much greater. And from the perspective of a long-time iOS user, it seems that Samsung has a potentially strong hold on the Android ecosystem. And I trust their security and design chops far less than I do Apple's.
That said, I could see myself sharing your same disillusionment if I have to upgrade from my 4.5 year old Macbook Pro. I don't think I've ever had a laptop for more than 3 years, and I was happy to have an even shorter cycle when it came to Apple computers. I helped a good friend purchase a new MBP, and the most I can say is that I'm happier that she's on the MBP than on the old Dell laptop that she reverted from Windows 7/10 to XP. But I'm willing to wait another year or 2 for a improved model.
Good point. While there are some disappointing developments in macOS/iOS land (even hardware), I still much prefer that ecosystem to the Windows/Google/Android datenkraken.
Certainly we've seen a lot more quality problems recently than we are used to seeing from Apple, even in first releases of a new system. This is bad for users and bad for the brand.
However I wouldn't say all of these are terrible faults any different from what they've done before. As a vertically integrated, full-ecosystem brand Apple has consistently chosen to design towards where they feel the industry ought to be, not where it is incrementally advancing towards. They did this with thunderbolt vs firewire, and they are doing it now with bluetooth 5 vs headphone jacks. With Airbuds you can have a single earpiece (well, two) that provides high quality two-way audio for your macbook while working, your phone while driving, and your watch while running, and eventually your HomePod while walking around the house, and their handoff technology automatically switches between them. THAT is what they were designing towards, but they just didn't tell us that when they introduced the iPhone 7.
Is this good or bad? It depends. It is a lack of personal choice and a concession of liberty. Ted Kaczynski* would be appalled at everything Apple represents, for reasons that as a libertarian I can understand. However Apple's "abuse" of its monopolist position has allowed the creation of a highly integrated and seamless technology ecosystem that genuinely makes my life better, at some cost to my pocketbook, and could not have existed in a free market. And since no one is forced to buy Apple.. is that still a bad thing? It's definitely not black and white.
* Not someone I usually bring into conversations, but I saw Manhunt recently and it was rather thought provoking. Highly recommend watching, regardless of whether you typically enjoy police procedurals.
Annoyingly even with those problems which I agree with I find it’s the least shit thing. Note that I didn’t say the best because nothing has earned that title.
This week I have lost a whole day of my life to printer problems on windows 10. Apple stuff in the house just prints!
At work PCs just work. Macs can not print and a colleague of mine is a forced email printer for the UX people that _think_ they must use hardware they do not know how to use. All the time they complain about PC and how wonderful the macs are, but they can not even attach the computer to an external screen or projector.
And the laptops only come with USB-C ports, and I'm yet to meet anybody who owns anything which can be plugged into one of those without a dongle (I suppose excluding their Mac charger :)).
I have one of the 2016 MBPs and while I bought a USB-A to USB-C dongle, I almost never use it. I have the USB-C to USB-C cable that came with it for power, and also (gasp) bought a couple new cables: one USB-C to Lightning, and one USB-C to Micro-USB.
I get that people are upset that Apple's gone full bore on USB-C "early," but they did that with USB, period. When the first iMac came out in 1998, it was the first computer to have only USB ports--and pretty much nobody was making USB peripherals back then. (And one of the two USB ports on the iMac was guaranteed to be taken up by your keyboard/mouse, so as USB took off, Apple was also early to the "not having enough ports" game. Heyo!)
There are legitimate things to complain about with the current MBP models; I don't like the keyboard, either, although I certainly don't have any problem with battery life. (My understanding is that it varies much more sharply than previous models depending on the system load.) I think only 2 USB-C ports on the low-end 13" model (the one I have) is too few. I think all of the laptops should probably have SD slots (c'mon, Jony, SD cards are thin, okay?). And at least so far, the Touch Bar hasn't justified itself. But when it comes to going all-in on USB-C, I'm not one of the ones who thinks that's a mistake on Apple's part. If anything, I think it's a mistake not to swap the Lightning port on the iPad Pro for a USB-C port.
It's become a bit of a joke that every year is "the year of the linux desktop," but seriously I've been amazed at how awesome machine I can get with linux for half the price of a macbook. Linux UX has come a long way. Both Gnome and KDE these days have a pretty complete and nice experience.
Every time I go back to desktop Linux, my experience is a nightmare.
It usually includes updates (or myself by mistake? not sure) making my system so broken that I have to reinstall and start again from scratch.
This year I thought I'd try with the Pro after the MacBook Air wasn't upgraded with retina, but if I have to spend almost EUR 2,000 and have faulty hardware and a broken OS that shows my password in clear text, might as well spend 1/3 to get a just-as-good laptop with elementary OS on it.
> It usually includes updates (or myself by mistake? not sure) making my system so broken that I have to reinstall and start again from scratch.
I hear that a lot, but I always wonder what distro people are using or what they do to their machines or what hardware they have etc.
My current laptop at home has been getting every 6 monthly Ubuntu in-place upgrade since 13.04 and hasn't had an issue. Same with the kids second hand laptops. But I choose Thinkpads and make sure I always get Intel graphics and wifi chipsets for compatibility.
Based on my colleagues experiences though - I don't have anywhere as much upgrade confidence at work with my Macbook Pro though (still on El Capitan).
Gnome and KDE both still make me want to puke up blood but I would agree there will come a point in the not too distant future where Apple's going to have to look at cutting Mac prices. I mostly buy second hand these days just because I don't want to spend $2k+ when a $1k used machine is good enough for my needs.
I would pay _more_ for a Linux laptop than a Mac if I _had_ to. It is a matter of taste and also what you are used to. I have the choice not to use KDE and Gnome and choose xmonad instead. Macs are horrible for many of those that are not used to them.
I’ve been abandoned on updates by Motorola or whoever it is owned by on the current whim within a year of buying my G2 and G3 handsets. I don’t feel I can trust them or Google with my cash. Not only that Google makes it difficult to consider your privacy because at every turn there’s a trap.
And god forbid one goes wrong because the repair and aftercare service at least in the U.K. is dire. I was told a handset was water damaged after it failed. Turns out it’s shipped to a 3rd party repairer who blames it on you if they can’t fix it. I had to hit moneyclaim (small claims court) to get it back.
Ergo I bought a 6s and have had zero problems with it. It just works.
Meh, I've been "abandoned" for updates on my Moto Droid Turbo as well. I have to tolerate the horror that is Marshmallow, despite the fact that Oreo is now the king of the hill.
And you know what? I just don't care. The security updates have been pushed in a timely manner, even for Marshmallow if they were required at the system level. Application updates (including to System WebView and security critical services) continue to deliver new functionality.
But yeah, if you want a great camera and consistent full system updates, you should probably skip these.
G2 seems to still get updates if you install LineageOS. My Note2 works beautifully. It is a pity that you have to install it yourself though. On Apple you get updates for as little as 2 years (5s). Neither is good. I would so much prefer buying a phone with vanilla Android and open drivers. But I can still buy an Android phone that I can change batteries and SD-card. One that is not planned to be obsolete.
Yes, but you don't _have to_. My phone is absolutely perfect. It's got a fingerprint sensor, 4K camera, nice screen, and even an phone jack which I use very often.
You forgot to mention that unlike my 2011 MBP you can't open the thing up anymore whereas I'm still free to put 16 GB of Ram and an SSD into a 6 year old machine and make it fly again.
Honestly similar arguments can be made for Windows and Android.
I have the premium devices for both (Surface Book and Google Pixel) and I still have daily annoyances.
On Windows 10, you will lose audio if the computer goes to sleep while connected to a TV via HDMI - requiring a restart. It was reported over a year ago and a similar issue exists with external monitors.
Windows Hello recognizes me but occasionally does not log me in and gives me no indication why. Is it a bug or a security feature? It's been over a year without a fix.
If I adjust the angle of my Surface Book display, the keyboard will not work for a few seconds due to a common hardware issue. It wouldn't bother me except the Surface Book is extremely top heavy and simply typing with the keyboard on your lap can make the display wobble causing the keyboard to cut out every few seconds.
The Surface Book power cable from the outlet to the brick is so short the brick cannot reach the floor from a common outlet height.
The Surface Pro 4 had minor light bleed issues. Microsoft attempted to fix it, but the new Surface Pro 2017 has even worse light bleed issues (except for the devices given to tech bloggers).
On Android:
Google removed the headphone jack from the Pixel 2.
If I ask Google to Remind Me of X when I get Home, it often reminds me days later (even though I use Google maps every day for navigation).
If I use Ok Google to dial my wife while I'm driving, it asks "Mobile or Skype". If it doesn't hear me properly, which happens 25% of the time, it repeats the question. But if I answer, "Mobile" it searches Google Maps for all Mobile gas stations :)
> They placed the charger for their wireless mouse under the mouse so you can't use it while charging, and the list goes on and on--particularly with software.
Ouch, who let the intern design that one?... Kidding, but really did they not QA test this and how did nobody at QA not say this was a terrible idea? I'll stick to my wireless trackball..
It's pretty terrible UX, but I can see how they came to the idea. If the mouse lasts all day, then surely the user will just charge it when they are done. However, this is a hard thing to train people to do. For people with a desk that step away at the end of the day, such as leaving the office) it is a bit easier to build the habit. However, if you are a user who uses the computer on and off all day, or doesn't have a permanent desk, it might be hard to remember to flip the mouse over and plug it in at the end of the night. Particularly if it's in your backpack. I don't personally use a mouse with a laptop, but I know plenty of people who do.
The mouse also just looks weird when flipped over to charge, and you can't really try to even charge it while it's in a backpack if you wanted to, due to the 90deg angle it makes when plugged in.
Friend told me his wife leaves it charging when she's done using it at night. But I agree it's kind of terrible UX. On the other hand... The Marathon Mouse I bought years ago only needed new batteries 3 years after me having owned / used it daily, and it came with it's own batteries.
Not that I necessarily agree, but I've heard that Apple intentionally designed it that way because they didn't want users to plug the cord in all the time and effectively make it a wired mouse. They wanted users to actually use the mouse wirelessly as intended.
That certainly seems like a more logical explanation than literally no one at Apple anticipating such an obvious design consequence for a major accessory.
There's a good chance that GP has the 2016 MBP (that introduced Touchbar). I have the "cheap" (hahahaahaha) version without Touchbar, and have had intermittent problems with the left shift key and the cursor down key (sticky, or unresponsive unless pressed very firmly) - quite annoying. Oh, and the battery life, if you actually use your CPUs, is rather short.
Well, my MBP is 10 months old, the 2016 model (not the touch bar model) and I get 15 hours battery still, after daily rigorous development use since buying it.
Just as I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect place to live, a perfect person to spend your life with, a perfect food to eat every day of your life, I also don't think the perfect computer company exists, the perfect laptop exists... But when I weigh all the conveniences and quality of my MBP with other non-Apple machines I've owned, it really is a no-brainer for me.
Yes, of course and I am a web dev and have lots of windows open, but this is definitely a lot worse than anything I've used before.
I personally think that it's the screen. Not sure. As we're speaking, Finder is taking up 12GB of memory as well as lots of CPU: https://imgur.com/a/RwSvI (I just installed High Sierra 2 days ago, though).
I don't understand what you mean about resetting the iCloud password. I change mine every 3-4 months, and it always takes place immediately. Furthermore, all of my devices immediately notice and ask me to login again. Everything - my phone, laptop, desktop, TV, etc. Is it possible there's some other problem with your account? I've been doing this for literally 10 years and never had to wait even a minute to do it.
"For your security, recovery includes a waiting period that may be several days or longer depending on the information you can provide to verify your identity. Apple Support cannot help you shorten this time. "
The article at that link has nothing to do with resetting passwords, it refers to recovering your lost account password. It even says so right in the text that you quoted. The article you're looking for is probably this one: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht201487
Also, the word "waiting" does not appear on that page anywhere.
Probably undiscerning cut-and-paste from some FUD article, without actually verifying it themselves. I say this because the text of the article might have changed since that little nugget was stashed away, as one can find the following text in the linked article: "Next, wait for the recovery process to finish, which might take a few days or more." And I say "without verifying it" because, well, that has nothing to do with changing your password. Had it actually been tried, it would become evident that these are two very different operations.
> Account recovery is an automated process designed to get you back into your Apple ID account* as quickly as possible and deny access to unauthorized users. For your security, recovery might take several days or longer, depending on the verification information that you can provide.
It's still pretty disingenuous to suggest the process will usually take several days just for a "password reset". This is a pretty specific scenario where you've lost access to a device associated with your Apple ID, you're using two factor auth, and you've forgotten what your apple ID is. This isn't a password reset workflow at all.
It's interesting to me how much of the Apple apologia has become, `it's not as bad as ${getCompanyfromContext()}` or `${getRandomCompetitor()} does it too, so that makes it ok`
The keys are so shallow that after normal use (no crumbs or anything like that) they start having problems.
As for battery life, they had to make it 4mm thinner just for the sake of it, and the screen sucks all the battery. I wish it was thicker but I could actually use it without keeping plugging it in.
Oh, the emoji bar laptop? Yeah. I tried one of those when they showed up in the stores and the keyboard is pathetic. Ended up switching to a Thinkpad (should have done it years ago).
The mouse thing really irks me. The moment the mouse needs charging is the moment is stop working. So why am I expected to then not use the product while it charges? A product that used to have a wire connected to it and is sitting right next to the computer? How is having a hole in the bottom at better than having a hole on the side?
I wouldn't mind it so much if the low battery alert was actually useful.
But it only pops out when there's like 1% battery left in the mouse - basically making sure you will lose power soon. The sheer lack of thinking here boggles the mind. Guys, it's an alert, it's not useful at all if I get it right before the bad thing happens.
How would you like it if I switched on my turn signal 1 second before I actually turn my vehicle in front of you?
Incidentally if anyone's looking for a mouse, Logitech really handles this perfectly. When it's plugged in to USB they use the cable for power + data so there's a tiny bit less latency and no worries about signal dropping. It switches the data to the wireless dongle automatically if the cable is unplugged.
The mouse runs off of a single rechargable AA battery (came with an Eneloop brand NiMH which are well regarded). If your battery dies you can either plug it in to charge or just pull the battery and swap in a fresh one. Since it's a standard battery you can toss the dead one in a normal NiMH charger.
I second the recommendation, been using a logitech performance MX mouse for probably 4-5 years now. My company gave out the apple mouse and I made them specially order the MX for me. I am a creature of comfort though as I did the same for my keyboard.
I did the same. I tried to use the Apple mouse for a couple months, I really did, but I felt my wrists turning into frozen fish and decided enough was enough. (This was the previous generation mouse where you needed to replace the AA batteries yourself, like a barbarian. Are the current ones shaped any differently at least?). Brought in my old Das Keyboard while I was at it. World of difference. And I don't feel any less cool, despite there being several physical buttons and a hole on the side of my mouse.
What irks me the most is that they went through all of that trouble to make sure that you can't use the mouse like a wired mouse. You shouldn't ever have to take steps to hinder your customers using their devices just to protect your brand image.
I have one on my desk. It's the biggest non-issue ever. Do you ever need to go to the bathroom? Or get up and get a drink of water? Plug it in, and by the time you come back, you have enough charge to last you the rest of the day. Remember to plug it in overnight, and you've got at least a month of charge. It's just a ridiculous complaint that it can't be used while plugged in. It's a wireless mouse - why would you want it to have a wire?
If it was on the side, people would keep it plugged in all the time - like one does with a mouse. That's against the creative vision of the team who designed the mouse.
They removed the audio jack from their phones and their "pro" laptops barely have any ports left. Some people use those, you know.
> I think this is a lot better than having a hole on the side of your mouse at all times.
The OP clearly doesn't.
> Please list it. I'm dying to know more!
Just a few of the top of my head:
mDNSResponder, GPU drivers, WiFi issues, Safari used to crash a lot, goto fail, there was the fun one were the GPU driver was loaded too late so that ... something something color profiles ... your screen had a blue tint the whole fucking time. Lots of good stuff, really.
> Silly opinion.
I'd love to elaborate on this one but I'm afraid my MBP will overheat when continue typing.
HN can be a fickle beast - glad you haven't been downvoted.
The hate on the new macbook pro's was especially interesting - they are solid machines and my company had no issues as they started provisioning over the old ones for new employees.
Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application.
Spend 5 minutes with the app and you'll find a half dozen bugs and amateurish mistakes. It's baffling, and it's been a problem for two years now.