
High Sierra macOS freezing and stops - mhasbini
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8101384
======
ohthehugemanate
Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful,
powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their
built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the
design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market
at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now
apparently their major OS updates go out without quality control for things
like a blank root password, or random crashed and freezes. I tried to use
OSX's logs last week - they were spammed to death with warnings and errors
from OS components and bundled software. Half the OS services break or emit
warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal
month.

I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but
is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider
comment here?

~~~
timdeneau
The fix: stop the annual release cycle. There isn't a customer demand for it,
and it’s a hassle for basically everyone.

The issues in 10.12.x get fixed with 10.13, but 10.13 has the same amount of
different issues, so it’s a wash. There’s no stable version anymore.

~~~
breatheoften
I disagree with this assertion 100%. They should keep making investment in and
improvement to the yearly release process and build the knowledge necessary to
do this with fewer errors...

~~~
dcow
I found the scrum master (;

------
makecheck
I blame strongly Apple’s inability to make developer-focused tools _easy_ and
_unbreakable_.

For instance:

\- I _do not file bugs anymore_. Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a
lot of information up front, and is then 100% opaque. Bugs stay marked New and
_untouched_ for _months_ or longer, only to be closed with Duplicate or some
other lame status (with absolutely no way to search or read the apparently-
similar bug reports to understand the issue and resolution). If their goal was
to ensure no real participation in the process of helping their products
become better, they’ve succeeded.

\- Xcode 9.x routinely has failing background processes, even in response to
explicit actions, and not just for obscure features. For instance, an
_ordinary build_ seems to spawn background tasks that _frequently display old
errors as new errors_ , only to mysteriously produce a “Successful” build
_while still showing all those older errors_ ; I have to Clean and Build to be
absolutely sure!

\- Xcode 9.x failures are somehow better than Xcode 8.x failures where
Literally. One. Second. Can. Pass. In. Between. Every. Character. You. Type.
Then, SourceKit can enter an _unending failure loop_ , to the point where
Xcode _must be restarted_ lest you have to click OK on errors every second.
And you would think I could simply move on to Xcode 9.x but I _can’t stop
using Xcode 8.x_ due to other developer-unfriendly decisions Apple makes, such
as ending support for SDKs or changing compilers in backward-incompatible
ways, where using the Xcode 8.x suite (faults and all) is unavoidable.

Apple is showing signs that a split into sub-companies would be useful (kind
of like Claris/FileMaker Inc.). There’s no _particular_ reason why things like
bundled apps couldn’t just become preferred 3rd-party downloads from the App
Store, where spin-off companies make iThis/iThat or even things like Photos.

If that happened, Apple would be forced to actually communicate with several
entities on a regular basis and improve their external-facing tools. You can
bet that SpinOff, Inc. would not stand for having major problems with
developer tools or SDKs for instance.

~~~
Improvotter
> I do not file bugs anymore.

I've filed a small amount but stopped pretty quickly because the web app where
you report bugs is just horrible. I literally ended up making 2 bug reports
the first time, 1 for the bug I wanted to report and then another bug report
for the web app. I can't even be bothered to check whether those issues have
been resolved, but I don't even care anymore at this point.

~~~
eridius
How long ago was this? They revamped their external-facing bug reporter fairly
recently.

------
baggachipz
Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet
because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers.
What does it bring to the table besides headaches?

~~~
ninkendo
It’s... fine? Honestly I’ve upgraded on day 1 on every OSX release since lion,
the only complaint I really have about High Sierra is that it doesn’t really
change anything. I can’t even name one thing off the top of my head that
changed since Sierra, and I use almost every built-in app (Mail, iTunes,
Calendar, Safari, Terminal.)

Safari has some new things (global and per-site reader view, disabling
autoplay, privacy enhancements) but that doesn’t really count since it also
works on Sierra.

I honestly don’t see what all the complaints are about, but I might just be
lucky.

~~~
loopbit
You might, I have a mac mini that has run fine since day one of the high
sierra update. However, my rMBP has had several freezes (at least once a
month) and a few graphical glitches (had to do a hard reboot after every
instance).

Both were updated at the same time. I keep my work laptop (another rMBP) on
Sierra and I might just skip updating that one altogether.

~~~
ninkendo
Well, I also have occasional freezes (also probably once a month, typically
it's when resuming from sleep) on my MBP but no more so than I had in Sierra
and all the releases before. My iMac (5k) has been pretty much 100% reliable
though, so I attribute most of this to the MBP hardware.

I'm not saying 10.13 has been perfectly reliable, but it doesn't seem less
reliable than previous versions to me.

------
reacharavindh
Not so long ago, I use to justify to myself that:

* Mac is good hardware and software I can count on. Just pay and focus on your real job.

* Apple cares about privacy very publicly, so they are probably not selling my data or doing anything stupid with it. Although, there is no way for me to know.

* My work is buying the hardware for me. Why bother spending time building one that I need to maintain so much. Get the one that "Just works!"

But, recent weeks of blunders and annoyances in my Mac after updating to High
Sierra is making me rethink. I'm going to spend my weekend configuring my Dell
XPS with VoidLinux and set it up with open alternatives for most of my use
cases.

True, I will miss some niceties like Retina Fisplay and crisp font rendering,
but my self-made solution can be comfortably close to it. Although I will
sorely miss the "Copy on the phone, Paste on Mac" functionality.

I will setup Tarsnap or something with crown and forget about backups except
for restoration testing every year.

I will use Darktable on photo library that is synced to phone via NextCloud.
Instead of Apple Photos.

Recent Firefox with Adblocker and Ghostery as a web browser.

Chrome for browsing Facebook and Amazon.

KVM instead of Virtualbox for VM needs. Docker for container needs.

Sublime Text for programming editor.

Clementine as Music player

VLC or MPlayer for media

Will figure out the rest. And put all the install/configure commands on a
Ansible playbook and commit it to Github. So that next OS install is
completely automated. If y'all have any tips for including in my setup this
weekend, I'll appreciate it very much!

~~~
pecg
Long time voidlinux user here on a laptop, and have also used extensibly:
archlinux, gentoo, openbsd (it hosts and smtp, and web server public on the
internet), freebsd, alpine and slackware-current. From void you should expect
many things to be different:

* No launchd or systemd mess. Runit takes care of the init process.

* xbps: a fast and simple package management software, that also resolves dependencies.

* Clean but scarse documentation, if you have used other distributions you should be fine.

* No automatic configuration of programs, you have to explicitly define what you want for sshd, nginx, etc.

I started GNU/Linux distribution hopping after archlinux's maintainers decided
to migrate to systemd, back then I had been using it without problems and for
experimentation purposes followed the migration; after a couple of updates I
had an unbootable system were systemd wasn't able to run logind, diagnosis
showed all files where in place, but run out of time and didn't want to
discover what was wrong with it.

I use voidlinux on a T410s mainly for developing, learning programming
languages and experiment from time to time with KVM and libvirt (which is
another mess), hope to change completely to openbsd in a couple of months.

~~~
reacharavindh
Looking into VoidLinux very much for the reasons you listed. So far, from my
playing with void on a VM, it feels like the "OpenBSD" of the Linux world. I
love OpenBSD (using it for pf Firewall, DNS and DHCP at work) but I seriously
doubt how it'd work in a laptop. My concerns are power consumption, and
drivers. Even VoidLinux with the latest linux kernel gives me trouble to
enable audio. I really want my laptop to have audio, Wifi, Sleep/resume, web
browser working properly. You think OpenBSD might be up to it?

~~~
kanishkdudeja
Why not Ubuntu?

~~~
reacharavindh
Because I want a BSD-like simplicity/minimalism with a Linux kernel(for its
extensive driver support for laptops). Ubuntu is just not that.

~~~
explainplease
Recommend restic for backups. Great new software that's under active
development.

Recommend Debian for the distro. It does a lot of things for you, and
correctly, but it is also infinitely configurable. It can be the "just works"
distro you need, as well as the hacker's tinkerable distro you want. And it
has staying power and consistent security updates. Mix stable with
testing/unstable and get stability where you need it and recency where you
need that. Plus the community and documentation are very good.

------
jarym
Had the same issue - the Console App logs have taken a SERIOUS step back from
earlier versions; lots of garbage that should clearly be DEBUG or TRACE level
(I guess remnants of what developers have been working on).

Anyway, after days of experimentation, in my case, I _think_ it was WebGL on
Chrome. If I disabled GPU graphics acceleration in Chrome then the freezing
would never happen. I downloaded the NVidia drivers for my 2012 MBP and so far
WebGL is working fine on Chrome without freezes. To be clear, the whole
computer froze - couldn't even more the mouse pointer!

Obviously, given the botched state of High Sierra in general others may be
experiencing different causes for their freezing.

Deeply unsatisfied at Apple over this, how hard does it have to be to take a
perfectly fine OS (pre-High Sierra) and keep it that way?

~~~
zzzcpan
This particular problem might not be Apple's fault. WebGL in Chrome doesn't
seem to work on my Linux desktop either, just crashes. And Chrome always has
issues with hardware acceleration, on some machines it just adds 1-2 second
freeze before every page load, on others it has some weird flickering.

~~~
Jyaif
If an application can freeze the OS, then there's definitely a problem with
the OS. In this case it's probably macOS' notoriously bad GPU drivers.

~~~
zzzcpan
Freezing the OS is rather easy to do and hard to protect from, especially if
you want to permit an application to access a lot of fancy things for
performance. I'm probably underselling how fragile these things are: I once
killed Xorg and the laptop got bricked and never booted again.

My point is that Chrome on Linux has many issues with GPUs too, so they at
least share the blame, since they don't seem to be capable of properly
handling GPUs in the wild.

------
apatheticonion
Makes sense. I'm going to use this as a venue to bitch about my experience
with MacOS. I have been a long time Windows/Linux user but have long admired
MacOS from a distance as it appeared to be, essentially, a polished Linux
distro. Bash along side consistent UX, sign me up.

I purchased a MacBook Pro 8 months ago. I walked into the experience loving
it. I wanted to love it. I wasn't some Windows fanboy who hates on MacOS, it's
just that after I got using it for a while, I was shocked at how unintuitive
it really was. The good things were really great (trackpad gestures,
spotlight, it's aesthetic) but that bad things were silly bad (full screen
apps, no intelihide on the dock, no window tiling, battery, finder, garbage
filesystem support, etc)

I felt betrayed. (NZD, 2017 13" best touchbar model) I paid 3000 of my hard
earned dollars for dated specifications so I could have access to what I
expected would be the ultimate user experience on a computer. I ended up
selling my MacBook after 6 months because every time I looked at it, I
remembered how much I paid and how much the UI frustrated me. High Sierra was
the tipping point, I was hoping for an improvement to my experience, instead
they gave me a new file system and "ES5 support in Safari" \- according to Tim
Cook.

I'm keeping up with MacOS and hope they start caring about their MacBook/MacOS
product(s), because as soon as they do, I'll buy one.

For the record, Windows and Linux have their own sets of compromises, but I
can run them on a Laptop I bought for $800, or a used Desktop I got for $200,
being equally as productive.

tl;dr - I was happy paying the premium for UX, however I got an incomplete
product and I was mad. /rant

~~~
sanderjd
Honestly, I just pay the money for the trackpad. I've never found a laptop
from anyone else that had a usable trackpad. I think the differences between
OSes these days are almost entirely superficial, and CPUs, disks, and RAM
speeds are all firmly in the "more than good enough" category. The only things
that matter are the amount of RAM, the display, battery life, and the
trackpad. You can get 32 or 64G of RAM for anything, and higher-end machines
mostly all have nice screens and similar battery life. But nobody else seems
to know how to make a decent trackpad.

~~~
apatheticonion
Yeah the trackpad is so good. I found myself intuitively using it rather than
the USB mouse I had plugged in.

Battery was extremely poor on my MacBook though. It was 5 hours (possibly a
defect, or maybe the touchbar drained too much of it?). My previous laptop was
rocking a gen 4 i7, 4k screen and it gets 7+ hours.

~~~
sanderjd
Ah yeah, I haven't had one with the touchbar yet, and I hope they figure out
the folly of those before I need a new laptop.

------
sarreph
For those with Nvidia GPUs, may I suggest (as per previous comments[0]) that
you download the Nvidia BETA drivers[1] for your system. (Disclaimer: at your
peril — and for your relevant device... This can be hard to figure-out as what
your Mac says your GPU is, in my case a 750M GT, is actually classed as a
GeForce GTX 680 :') -- what I've linked to)

Seems to have done a decent job at patching up some of the more serious un-
usability that High Sierra caused me and my Mac.

Moving to High Sierra was the worst performance-wise update I made to my Mac.
I'm so disappointed with Apple's sluggish reaction to these issues, that have
been reported in high numbers[2], from months ago...

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265)

[1] -
[http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-...](http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-
us)

[2] -
[https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomme...](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomment-345049249)

~~~
pentae
In hindsight the best decisions I've made this year regarding the enjoyment of
my Apple devices was not upgrading from iOS 10, and not upgrading to High
Sierra. I really want to buy new Apple products and enjoy them but the company
doesn't make hardware or software I want anymore.

~~~
vonseel
> I really want to buy new Apple products and enjoy them but the company
> doesn't make hardware or software I want anymore.

Problem solved! Move on to buying things you do want.

~~~
staplers
Realistically, nothing matches macOS in terms of beautiful simplicity with a
vast range of apps for designers/artists.

Every other solution requires major hacking and customization (VMs, emulators,
obscure OS', lacking in compatibility, mobile integration, backups)

Apple users are complaining so loudly now because they had it good for so long
and now it's fleeting.

------
DonHopkins
Whenever my MBP gets slightly hot (if for example I turn the room heater on,
instead of opening a window to let in cold air, or if I dare to have too many
tabs open in Chrome), the whole system grinds to a halt and becomes totally
useless, while Activity Monitor shows the "kernel_task" pinned at 400% - 700%
CPU, with the CPU LOAD graph showing a mostly red mountain of system time
being burnt by kernel_task.

I think it may be "SpeedStep" shitting all over itself and putting the CPU
into a death spiral.

I've had several generations of MBP that continuously fail this way, so it's
not something new to High Sierra.

I'm really disappointed that Apple keeps making each model of MBP thinner and
thinner and hotter and hotter, instead of making it thicker with better
cooling and ventilation. I don't fucking NEED it to be that thin! What I NEED
is for it not to fucking freeze all the time.

~~~
ajmurmann
That drives me even more crazy with iMacs. They are on a table. The table is
made out of wood! It's sturdy. Please make it 6" deeper, add a real graphics
card and some real cooling.

------
LarryMade2
High Sierra is a mess, I had someone whose computer was un-bootable because of
it. I went through many "solutions" only to finally roll it back to a previous
OS version via backup (thankfully they used Time Machine regularly), and told
them do the current system updates but don't update the OS.

I've worked through many update issues in OSX over the years, and the fixes
were reasonable, but this one is really bad, and sometimes there isn't any
workable solution than to roll-back.

I've noticed the OSX/iOS upgrade push is really affecting a lot of people in
different ways lately, another has iPad/iPod issues because you have to update
OS to get a never version of iTunes to talk to upgraded iOS devices that are
now locked out of previously compatible versions of iTunes - and with device
signing theres no way to roll back the mobile devices iOS... and with Mac App
store theres no way to get an update thats not High Sierra anymore so Macs
that can do say Yosemite but not HS are S.O.L. (unless you already have the
install media) Blegh.

~~~
aaronbrager
You can still download old versions of macOS from the Mac App Store, eg Sierra
is available here [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208202](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202)

~~~
LarryMade2
I see they list of OSs but no location to actually download any older version
except sierra. Where do you see that?

------
mberning
People don't seem to remember or appreciate they quality of pre-iCloud
versions of osx and ios. I remember buying Snow Leopard in a cardboard box
from Microcenter for $20. It had almost no truly new features. Everything was
focused on making things work better and faster. And it showed. I would gladly
pay $20 or $50 or $100 or whatever Apple wanted to charge for a true bug fix
version of osx.

~~~
snowwrestler
You're remembering the marketing more than the reality of Snow Leopard. It had
all sorts of issues in the initial release. It was only after about 10.6.3
that it started to develop a reputation for being solid.

Snow Leopard ended up being a great release, but it didn't start that way.

------
paulnevada
High Sierra, after playing with the freeze-ups and slow typing recognition for
about a week I think I finally found the problem IMO. When Apple decided to
re-format to the APFS file system they had a huge re-format dilemma for folks
with only one SSD available to boot with. So Apple decided to go to a running
format of the solid state drive included in the High Sierra package. Guess
what! It doesn't work! Way too much fragmentation to the point of the computer
gets confused and lost trying to find needed data or a place to store it and
it want's to play beach-ball.

In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from
experiencing a beach-ball state of rest.

Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes
to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or
outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a
standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a
sentence or row of numbers.

I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit
me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I
had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I
re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot
drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and
ran first aid on it.

I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4
hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I
couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS
X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or
stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a
happy High Sierra user again..

~~~
Xophmeister
SSDs don’t suffer from access latency due to fragmentation like spinning disks
do. In fact, one would probably be better off not defragmenting an SSD because
all those writes will reduce the life of the disk.

~~~
paulnevada
Nope...OK, lets look at APFS here instead of HFS+..

Here's what I'm finding out today.. APFS understands which files will give the
biggest performance boost once defragged. It works in the background when the
machine is idle, so defrag won't impact system performance.

For macOS, High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part
of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does
copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata
until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides
information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is. Apple
will fix it, just a matter of time. For me a re-format did the job..

Why can my buddy buy a new Macbook formatted for APFS loaded from Apple with
High Sierra and it runs perfect? Now take that same Macbook and install the HS
update on a non APFS drive and re format to APFS and it runs like chit? Not my
opinion but just what I'm seeing on other forums.. There is a serious flaw in
the live update of the file system causing everyone problems..

I cured my problems completely simply by re-formatting the drive with Disk
Utility APFS and re-installing the same data and using first aid.. I'm very
happy with the results..

------
teilo
We are a mac-first company. About 350+ machines. We experienced all of these
issues while testing High Sierra. Multiple machines, some upgrades, some clean
builds. They seemed to be isolated to touchbar models, because we had no such
issues on any of our older models, nor the Macbook Esc.

Thankfully, 10.13.2 has fixed all of these issues for me. Before I would get a
lock up almost about half the time I tried to awake from sleep. Now I have
gone 2 weeks without a reboot.

New macOS releases have been plagued with sleep/wake issues for years, but
this one was worse than normal.

------
daBewt
I had this issue a lot _before_ upgrading to High Sierra.

In my case I did a clean install of my Mac and then installed High Sierra. The
issue then went from happening 3-4 times per day to about 3-4 time per week.

I suspect this (at least in my case) having a lot more to with the new Macbook
Pro with Touch Bar than macOS.

In any case, apple should do better

~~~
dunham
There have been some reports that this is related to the graphics drivers. I
don't know an easy way to disable the nvidia card, but perhaps disabling
graphics switching in settings (so it always uses the fancy card) might help?

The only issue I've had on my 2013 MBP is a black screen if I plug in an
external monitor while it's asleep.

Aside from that, it's been running fine. But I typically run it always plugged
in to external monitor and some sources on the internet suggest that the
secondary card is needed to run display port.

------
pfarnsworth
Why is Apple software so terrible these days? They have enough money to hire
the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of
their company? It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is
slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love
their job. Their debacle a few weeks ago with passwords, etc, and then
tripping over themselves two more times in a week is shocking for such a rich
company who can afford the very, very best.

~~~
jasonlotito
> Why is Apple software so terrible these days?

This is nothing new. This is status quo. It's been going on for years. Even
when Jobs was around. Thinking it wasn't happening is akin to someone now
saying, "I don't see any issues."

> They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they
> skimping on the most important part of their company?

Ask them why they colluded with other tech companies to keep salaries low and
thereby affect an entire industry. They've chosen not to invest in their
developers.

> It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big
> time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job.

Again, this is nothing new. Apple has a long history of failures and horrible
software that people conveniently forget about as time goes on.

> such a rich company who can afford the very, very best.

Again, they worked hard to ensure they don't have to pay it. Enough so that
they were taken to court over it, and lost.

But don't believe for a minute that other solutions are somehow better. Or
that other companies don't benefit from Apple's collusion, even if they didn't
take part.

------
Pica_soO
There should be a law for this if a company does no longer use/maintain a
software properly for which a customer paid the customers should have a right
to receive the source to effect repairs on their own.

------
lispm
I have a Macbook 12" from 2015 with High Sierra. Works fine with the latest
version. it took Apple a year to release a stable macOS for the Macbook. Now I
have very little problems, but before it was common not to wake up reliably,
running external screen had problems, etc.

My Quadcore i7 Mac mini is still a mess under High Sierra. I see it freezing
very often and especially when the machine gets some load. It's basically not
usable for anything beyond reading mail and browsing the web. It was freezing
once a month under Sierra. Under High Sierra it can freeze several times a
day. Last days it was also rebooting on itself, twice.

I had filed a bug report, but Apple asked for a full system diagnosis report,
which is not something I can give away because it would contain restricted
information.

------
kaffeinecoma
Adding my own anecdote, there seems to be some kind of problem with high I/O
loads on High Sierra.

One of my projects involves indexing thousands of URLs. During development I
use a large (80GB+) local cache of a few million files. Running the cache code
(~100 lines of simple Golang) totally brings my iMac (3.8GHz Core i5, 24GB) to
its knees. CPU shows as mostly idle & memory pressure is low, yet the machine
can't redraw windows properly after about 5GB of I/O to local SSD.

Completely frustrating. I moved the code over to an older (2010!) Mac running
Ubuntu and it handles it without breaking a sweat.

~~~
johansch
I doesn't sound all that unlikely to me that all these temporary UI freezes
are related to the new APFS then.

"How to skip converting to APFS when installing macOS High Sierra":

[http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-
sier...](http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sierra/)

------
macNchz
I’ve been having this problem myself on my year-old top end MacBook Pro, it
gives me flashbacks to Mac OS 9, which was the last time I had my computer
regularly just lock up entirely. Not great.

------
adpirz
It’s not just me! My 2014 spec’d out MBP (i7, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 750) was all
of a sudden lagging with just a few chrome tabs open for the first time since
I’ve owned it. I thought the issue might have been a Chrome release.

This is really disappointing, I wonder if it’s a portent of more slip ups to
come.

------
kitsunesoba
This definitely seems like a YMMV sort of deal. I’ve been using High Sierra
and iOS 11 across several devices and haven’t encountered any issues that are
more serious than minor annoyances. 2015 15” MBP, Late 2016 15” MBP, self
built Hackintosh tower, iPhone X, iPad Pro 9.7”, iPhone 7+. All are more or
less smooth with very occasional hiccups.

I also tend to avoid third party apps where possible, particularly the more
ungainly ones. Maybe that has something to do with it?

------
okket
FWTW, Late 2013 15" MBP: daily use, no problems with High Sierra

~~~
valuearb
2015 MBP, no problems either

~~~
goldmouth
2017, VMware fusion causes mine to constantly freeze.

~~~
valuearb
Well, i think you’ve identified the problem. I consider vmware fusion skin to
a virus and would delete it the moment my employer allowed.

~~~
chowyuncat
It still has the most stable implementation for Linux development when
compared to VirtualBox or Parallels. Docker for Mac is great for user space
dev, but I haven’t figured out how to kernel debug yet.

Two recent showstoppers, when I tried to switch from Fusion:

The shared folder driver for VB will panic a Linux guest if a shared folder is
accessed from a multithreaded compilation.

The shared folder driver for Parallels will panic a Linux guest if you load a
kernel module from a shared folder.

------
FollowSteph3
How many people actually program software for the Mac? Not develop on the Mac
but program for the Mac? It’s my experience that those who program on the Mac
versus FOR the Mac have different opinions on the quality of the OS :(

I know from experience that we deal with a ton of Mac specific issues that are
annoying and frustrating and are due to either low quality or they just won’t
fix cause it will be obsolete soon. So many items.

I’m OS agnostic but I will say that in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had
to deal with many more Mac spaecifc issues then Windows specific issues. All
kinds of random stuff just not working that should be. I can’t speak for Linux
distros cause we don’t support Linux directly, but in terms of OS specific
issues we’ve had to implement many a workaround to Mac specific OS bugs. Like
things just not working. In some cases Apple stated thue had no intentions on
fixing it. Not esoteric bugs but big ones that required big workarounds.

Anyways I suspect the results would be the same her between people who develop
on a Mac vs those that develop FOR the Mac :(

------
crdb
There is a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft right now.

Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can
(including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable
especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and
bloated.

The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the
rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-
technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably
runs in virtually all companies in the world today.

If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office
to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my
mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way
to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should
boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position,
even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.

~~~
martin1975
I've been preaching this for years... if MS adopts Linux, ups their GUI effort
to create something useful atop Wayland, while providing a seamless way to run
Win32 apps until the world migrates to Linux on the desktop helmed by
Microsoft, they will completely destroy Apple on short notice.

It would be a major, revolutionary move for Nadella to do this and I doubt he
has the heft or charisma to sell this to the board/shareholders, but if
Microsoft goes full steam ahead on Linux and dumps Windows, it's buh-bye Apple
and everything they ever produced. They can probably even eat into Google's
droid pie.

Ditch Win32/NT, port the cash cow called MS Office to Linux and polish a
Windows-like GUI atop Linux/Wayland in the best way they can, be it via Qt,
GTK, I don't care - just get it done... and set the world ablaze and free.

Bet you they could probably deliver something in under 3 years.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Why would they, they have nothing to gain from doing that, all it would do is
accelerate the decline of Windows revenue.

------
siteshwar
Reading recent discussions around Apple reminds me of this story[1]. I will
not be surprised if marketing people are the ones who are affecting software
quality.

[1]
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt)

------
EGreg
Can we have a conversation about how it can be that Apple, which used to
proudly advertise on "It Just Works", is sitting on billions of dollars in
cash AND YET, at the same time, iOS and MacOS experience some major
regressions with every new release?

I mean, Google has overtaken Apple in UI and UX user satisfaction and
usability. Steve Jobs would be rolling around in his grave.

Ever since the "skeumorphism" debate, Apple seems to have become a follower. I
don't want knee-jerk downvotes but an actual discussion about why Apple isn't
spending at least a billion dollars on a best-of-class program on establishing
itself as the leader in

    
    
      Stability
      Usability
      User Satisfaction
      Testing & Regressions
    

It's clearly abandoned the Mac store, for instance, and twice even forgot to
renew its certificate, making apps crash on startup. Crazy!

~~~
valuearb
I won’t downvote you, but this are just a bunch of random assertions. I’ve
upgraded to High Sierra, no problems. Done all the ios updates, no problems.

Apple was constantly dealing with quality issues while Jobs was alive.
Remember AntennaGate? Apple has more products and customers than ever now,
meaning more anecdotal complaints than ever.

And no one uses the Mac App store, so no problems.

~~~
EGreg
No one uses the Mac App Store?? First of all many people do. And second, isn't
that there aren't MORE people a problem for Apple?

How are people supposed to get apps for their Macs? Download from random
websites? How do updates happen?

~~~
valuearb
Yes. Developers would rather distribute outside of Mac app store.

------
sccxy
For me it is impossible to get updates for High Sierra.

App Store is not working and manual install is impossible. It tells my Macbook
Air has Fusion drive which is incompatible with latest High Sierra.

No Macbook Air has ever got Fusion drive..

Waiting for some free time to reinstall macOS.

~~~
dingo_bat
My wife recently installed Win10 on her Macbook Air. Seems to run perfectly
now :D

~~~
Nexxxeh
For anyone who doesn't want to (re)install macOS just to use Bootcamp just to
install the Win 10 drivers for hardware...

[https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier](https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier)

Grab the executable from Release, run it with -i .

Apple don't offer current Windows driver download packs on the website. Their
contempt for their own customers is beyond infuriating.

------
willhackett
I thought it was just me. But to see so many people disappointed with the
decline in quality of macOS and accompanying products is somewhat
comforting—at least from the potential standpoint that Apple may make some
response.

I've been a die-hard Apple user since moving from Windows in 2009. I'm even
powered by MobileMe from the days where you paid for your sync. Nothing has
changed much since then.

I find myself watching things like the Essentials Phone and Google's secretive
desktop operating system for some escape from the Apple ecosystem. I love the
hardware. I love the support. But the symphony of hardware and software
working together as one isn't as special as it used to be.

The desktop apps are inconsistent and distant to their iOS cousins. The
experiences in the apps seems hinged on a time long past. Newer "features" in
the operating system feel tacked on—not working effectively. I know they don't
want to merge iOS and macOS—but I feel they have a better grasp on what's
going on behind iOS than Mac. Perhaps it's time to put Mac out of its misery
and bring iOS a little bit of Mac—terminal, filesystem and more.

------
clord
When this happens to me I SSH into the machine and kill chrome or one of the
electron apps. Sometimes it will unfreeze enough to close terminal sessions.

------
lowbloodsugar
I have an Amazon "Smart Home Consultant" coming in a few hours to help me wire
up my Echos and figure out what else I need to buy to get a seamless Amazon
Music experience in my house. Bye-bye iTunes and iCloud. The Airports and
Apple TV are already gone, replaced by luma, echo and roku.

Next is a linux laptop instead of MBP. Works out about $500 cheaper for
similar spec, or same price for much better spec. And they're upgradeable, so
not having to buy another MBP in two years time means I can save probably
another $1500 over four years. Even the ultrathin 13" has one NVMe and one
2.5" bay. I'll be getting a 17", like apple doesn't make anymore. Only this
one has two NVMe bays and two 2.5" bays. Last straw was my 2011 MBP 17" had
video problems (reboots under gpu load) and they refused to fix it. Finally
this year it developed the pyjama stripes, and now they recognize it has a
problem, but oh dear, its out of warranty since Dec 2016.

There are five apple computers in this house. They are the last.

------
Shivetya
BTDT, have experienced numerous freezes on my 2013 iMac since my upgrade. At
first I suspected the NVidia video drivers as it locked up in a few games I
never locked up before in, yet reverting to the Apple drivers had no better
result.

Interesting is that whatever is in my browers; usually watching streamers or
listening to radio; still is active. I just have lost all input. Pulling the
USB connections have no effect. Then there are the times it just freezes hard.

the annoying part is that since I have bootcamp in all instances after a hard
freeze the system wants to boot to that volume instead and even more fun,
keyboard use of the option key fails until I let it successfully boot into
Windows. As in, the option key fails with either USB or BT keyboard until a
successful boot occurs

------
Friedduck
I’ve held off on High Sierra until the issues subside which doesn’t seem to be
soon.

The keyboard is second-rate on my 2017 MBP compared to previous models, and
had I known what a nightmare USB-C would be I wouldn’t have bought it—full
stop. The touch bar has occasionally been unresponsive, or outright crashes
forcing a reboot. (I’ve seen learned how to restart it. A sentence I should
never have to type.)

The problem is Apple has become so much worse just as the competition has
finally started to produce compelling options. They still have the lead (?)
but it’s no longer a foregone conclusion that they’ll offer the best
OS/hardware combination.

------
karmicthreat
I get these freezes as well. Even my touch bar is frozen during them.

I have not had any issues with APFS, but I usually have 100G or more free.

That said I am not going to windows even with the Linux extensions. Those just
are not quite there yet.

------
shurcooL
FWIW, late 2011 15" MBP here, latest public version of High Sierra, and no
serious problems with it. Feels and acts the same as all previous macOS
versions before it for me.

------
hitgeek
I upgrade an old 2011/2012 MacBook Pro to high Sierra so I could download the
latest Xcode.

there has been a few times since then that the machine will freeze then show a
folder with question mark icon.

surprisingly it boots up fine after turning it off and on again, but I'm
worried it won't last long.

its a bummer b/c even though the machine is old, I upgraded to 8gb of ram and
500gb ssd and the performance is comprisable to a new MacBook a just got.

------
jordache
I truly think this is an issue with the touchbar/usbc MBPs, less an issue with
HighSierra.

My MBP crashed all the time during wake w/ external monitor. Had weird video
playback choppiness that required restart, TouchID profile going away on its
own... This all occured before upgrade to high sierra and the issues persist
with high sierra.

~~~
bonniemuffin
Oh, interesting. I recently upgraded to a touchbar mac, and I've found that it
often crashes on waking if I have an external monitor plugged in. I've learned
to unplug my monitor before trying to wake it up. Thought it was just me...

------
nanomoose
I have a MBP Mid 2014; it has always had a freeze problem. During 2016
probably twice a week. Drove me nuts. I forget the 2015 rate. The second half
of this year, approx, has been really good to the point that I'd forgotten
about freezes until a recent "your computer restarted 'cos it had a problem".

------
Willamin
Happy user of a Macbook Pro 13" with Touch Bar chiming in here. No unusual
problems to report. I only experience slows/freezes when: \- I'm putting the
machine under heavy stress \- I've filled up all but a few hundred megabytes
of disk space \- the machine has 1-5% of its battery remaining

------
hsxd
This has been happening to me at least once a day ever since I updated. This
is my first and last Macbook.

------
taternuts
Upgrading for me left me with missing apps and having to fix homebrew and a
bunch of other CLI tools and their deps. First time I've ever run into
problems upgrading my macos, and will definitely wait a while and look for
threads like these before installing the next one.

~~~
aeontech
In my experience you need to upgrade/recompile brew apps on every major
upgrade (at least I have had to do it for last four or five).

I suppose you may have been able to avoid it if your installed apps happened
not to link to any system libraries?

If they do though, and the system libraries change, how can the brewed apps
possibly be unaffected?

------
alphabettsy
My only issue is Chrome freezing multiple times per day. That doesn’t take the
system down though.

~~~
softinio
must admit I switched to Safari from chrome a few weeks ago and couldn't be
happier.

I have too many tabs open all the time using safari impacts my life in a
negative way less :-)

Also swipe works :-)

------
lowbloodsugar
This thread is full of people who unknowingly played russian roulette, didn't
die, and are passing the gun to the next player saying "You shouldn't listen
to any of these people complaining about the problem. See, _I_ didn't die."

------
donarb
The title (which includes the url attribution) of this article is misleading.
Before clicking on this, I thought it was an official statement from Apple
about this problem. It is not, it is a post on Apple's support forum that
started back in October.

------
juanmirocks
My data point: I use my MBP for its hardware and OS (which I find reliable)
but nearly all the software I use is from third parties, most significantly
Google, which does a much better opinion in this matter IMO. Only notes and
reminders get my attention.

------
Roberto_ua
Very often, after opening a lid I have to restart MacBook. I see a black
screen with a mouse cursor for a long time (the most I waited was 5 minutes).
I assume this is a very common problem. MBP Mid 2014.

------
pastelsky
After updating to High Sierra, my screen freezes and then glitches with
psychedelic patters for a couple of seconds every time I log in. Not sure if
it's just me.

------
hitekker
Does it feel like macOS has become a cost center to Apple?

------
rajacombinator
It’s somewhat of an intractable problem. You have a bunch of khaki wearing
executives who have been with the company for 20+ years, whose stock has made
them rich enough to not work again. Do they care about building high
performance products? Do you care? (Whether you is CEO, board, investors,
customers even.) Or is it easier to half ass it and add some useless bells and
whistles? Even Steve Jobs, considered to be the ultimate perfectionist, didn’t
care about 95%+ of the products his company made.

------
jaequery
after i upgraded, i see its sluggish and slower. i have 2013 mbp and upgraded
to high sierra last week. it used to be snappy fast before but now even just
on chrome i see sometimes it gets sluggish and choppy. i am frustrated i
upgraded. anyone in the same boat as me?

------
treyfitty
It’s not just software. It’s hardware and service. Here’s my anecdote. I
bought a 2015 MacBook Pro with AppleCare second hand. The AppleCare doesn’t
expire until September 2018. So, I brought my laptop in because my webcam
wasn’t working all of a sudden. This is where the proverbial shit hit the fan:

1\. Required a full display replacement, and the Apple technician dropped my
laptop and left scuffs on the bottom. This was noted, and they replaced the
bottom without even bringing it up to me (but it took an extra day to wait for
the part to arrive). Upon picking it up, I noticed there was a dent, an
obvious dent, on the corner panel that they didn’t fix. The apple store was so
crowded, and the tech was unwilling to reason with me (cosmetic damage isn’t
covered, this is the way it was brought in... ya da ya da)so I left.

2\. Emailed Tim Cook. No response (obviously). Escalated (maybe Cook deferred
my case to them and they left a note on my account?) to customer relations and
they said to bring it in for repair.

3\. Brought it in for repair, and when I got it back, the headphone jack and
thunderbolt ports weren’t working because the side panel was shifted to the
point where the peripherals couldn’t be plugged in properly, unless I really
jammed it in there (and even then it didn’t work).

4\. Emailed Tim Cook again, bringing this to their attention that their 5th
Ave. flagship store is really cutting corners on repairs. At this point, I
just wanted a full blown replacement... call me entitled, but I wanted to
exercise my insurance, which was purchased just in case shit broke. Well, shit
broke and they mess up every repair. So, am I wrong to want a replacement? No
response again, but customer relations said “we spoke to the manager of the
store, they said to come back in.” Went back in, and the manager says “sorry,
we can’t replace it. But we can fix it again.” I was like, ok... you couldn’t
tell me that over the phone? I had to subject myself to the madness of the 5th
Ave location for no reason?

5\. The deemed the issue as a logic board issue. Replaced the logic board.
When I came to pick it up, the Genius says “... idk why they replaced the
logic board... your left ports are misaligned and damaged- it has nothing to
do with the logic board.”

My left ports still don’t work, but I don’t want to deal with Apple anymore.

Granted, they shipped me a pair of AirPods as a compromise since my headphone
jacks don’t work... but this was the worst experience I’ve had with any
warranty/insurance process. Including car accident, and home insurance. Health
insurance is still the absolute worst, but that’s a tough bar to pass- point
is, Apples quality everywhere has deteriorated to the point where they’re
almost trying to cut corners on purpose, rather than excelling at hardware +
service, like they used to.

------
racl101
Yikes. I have zero incentive to update to this OS.

------
akm143
fucking high sera stucks while formatting and reinstalling - Fuck you apple

------
_Simon
The sheer volume of these type of post is beginning to smell a lot like
astroturfing. The faux outrage is comical.

No issues with any Apple device with the lastest software for myself or anyone
I know. I can only assume that these are either edge cases or unmitigated
hyperbole.

~~~
skc
Heh, now you know how those of us with smooth Windows experiences feel.

