
OS X 10.10.3 seems to have done something bad to wifi drivers - zdw
http://garrett.damore.org/2015/05/macos-x-10103-update-is-toxic.html
======
Crito
Isn't the whole idea of a _massive_ company producing software for a very
small restricted set of hardware that this sort of thing isn't supposed to
happen? Random bullshit like this is expected with systems like Windows that
aim to support a whole mess of possible hardware configurations, that's not
really the case here.

What went wrong? Have they grown complacent? Cutting corners on QA?

~~~
seanp2k2
Totally subjective opinion, but it seems like since ~10.8 the reliability of
OSX has gone down substantially. I remember 10.5 and 10.6 being rock-solid on
a hackintosh, and now I have wifi / bluetooth issues all the time, sometimes
the graphics go all 16-colors-only, consisting of bright red + black-only or a
weird mix of like green, purple, orange (it's kind of trippy, but it requires
a reboot to fix).

Display mirroring / resolution switches goof up my jazz sometimes, unlocking
can take up to ~ a minute (from just the lid shut state), browsers eat RAM
like it's their job, etc etc.

If this is the best we can do in a $2800 (late 2014 15" rMBP maxed out)
computer where the company produces the hardware and software, color me
unimpressed.

~~~
madeofpalk
> hackintosh

I get the sentiment of what you're saying and I agree with it, but I have to
disagree with you - You can't blame the stability of your 'hackintosh',
running the OS on a completely unsupported configuration.

~~~
whatusername
That was OP's point... It _was_ stable on even a hackintosh. And now is
struggling on a rMBP.

------
inguinalhernia
Wi-fi trouble in OS X 10.10.x is very hardware dependent, brand new MacBook
Pro 2015 is just fine for example. But have heard so many users with nonstop
wireless problems from 10.10, to 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, perhaps 10.10.4 as
well, we'll find out soon enough.

The enormous ping post 10.10.3 update can also be from iCloud Photo Library
from Photos app, which if you let it, attempts to upload every single picture
from iPhoto and your Mac to iCloud, and download thumbnails from your iPhone /
iPad to the Mac. This is frequently many GB, I have a 64GB iPhone for example,
with 45GB of Photos. So, do you want that to upload from iPhone to iCloud and
download thumbs to the Mac at the same time? No not really but thats what it
tries to do, making the network very slow much like you describe. The
send/recv network congestion from that alone will easily send your ping to 10
seconds.

It's hard to imagine such low quality software could be coming out of Apple
lately. I hope they figure this out, maybe hire a larger Mac QA team if
needed. And the OS X Public Beta program is kind of a joke, all bug reports go
ignored. Not a single bug report I have filed has been addressed.

~~~
userbinator
The ironic thing about all this is that the (largely) Apple mentality of
hiding everything away makes it even more difficult to troubleshoot when
something does go wrong, like this. Most users won't narrow down the problem
so easily to their own machine if they only see the slowness described in the
article... but what they _will_ notice is a WiFi activity light that's
blinking almost all the time, even when they aren't doing anything, when it
used to not do that.

~~~
threeseed
No idea why they didn't put these in Utilities but:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications

There is an application there called Wireless Diagnostics.

~~~
eridius
Option-click the wifi menubar item. "Open Wireless Diagnostics…" is an option
there.

------
itbeho
[https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=mac+os+x+update+breaks+wi...](https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=mac+os+x+update+breaks+wifi)

Super irritating how often updates have broken wireless on Mac. You'd think
someone at Apple could focus on that since it happens so frequently.

~~~
javierbyte
I'm not defending Apple, but ...

[https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQ...](https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQCg#safe=off&q=windows+update+breaks+wifi)

[https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQ...](https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQCg#safe=off&q=android+update+breaks+wifi)

~~~
pkaye
As Apple has full control over their hardware and the selection is limited, I
expect better QA from them. I dealt with spotty WiFi driver issues with them
in the past and it took months to get a fix.

------
mrmondo
Yosemite has been a massive mess since the day it was released - easily the
most buggy, unreliable OS I've ever used. It is a stark contrast to the solid
reliability and performance of 10.8/10.9 and every update seems to make things
worse.

It's as if Apple is no longer spending as much time on stability and
performance and a lot more on flashy bells and whistles.

~~~
jaywunder
>Yosemite has been a massive mess since the day it was released

That's pretty unfair to say without giving examples.

~~~
13
Disable UI transparency, the volume change overlay still has black corners.

[http://i.imgur.com/pRNO7Oc.png](http://i.imgur.com/pRNO7Oc.png)

It doesn't for iTunes, just for volume and screen brightness changes.

~~~
threeseed
Not an issue for me (Late 2012 Mac Mini).

Given that disabling UI transparency is for accessibility purposes and is only
for certain graphics cards I wouldn't use this as an example of a major bug.

~~~
13
I can replicate on a 2014 Retina MacBook and a 2012 MacBook Pro. Lots of
people disable the transparency, not just for accessibility. I'm not a fan of
burning up my whole battery doing Gaussian blurs.

------
pervycreeper
"Mythical man-months" aside, Apple really has no excuse for putting out such
low quality software, considering their resources.

~~~
madeofpalk
Mythical man-month isn't even an excuse - Apple software isn't running late.
Well at least, the cycle is well known and it should be easy to add more
people from the beginning before it gets too late.

~~~
javert
Actually, this raises an interesting issue.

You truly can't speed up software dev by adding more people (beyond a certain
point)---it's not just on late projects that it is true.

But you can do that on testing. If you want to run 1,000 tests 10 times each,
to drive down the possible rate of errors to near zero, you just need to have
10,000 people run one test each.

So basically, you can make the entire process take only as long as the longest
single test.

~~~
Joeri
Ah, but you still need to design the tests, which requires knowing the exact
design and behavior of the software, which is subject to late change due to
tester feedback. So there is a lot of critical path forming at the end of a
software dev cycle which more people cannot pull you out of.

The mythical man month reminds us that 9 women can't make a baby in one month.
Adding people to a project bound by a critical path can only make it later.
And the more you care about design and UX in your initial release, the more
you will see that sort of thing.

~~~
javert
That's true. However, it doesn't really negate my point, it complements it.

In this case, Apple could have a "test" that is: install the new OS under test
on a machine, and see if performance degrades on other machines on the same
network.

You could have 10 people test it with 10 different networks. It's expensive,
but Apple could heat their HQ by burning cash if they wanted.

Admittedly, some things will still get through due to tests that you would
only think to do in hindsight. But once you have the test, they won't get
through again.

------
Tehnix
I have not experienced this in the slightest. In fact, my OS X (always on the
latest, and am now on 10.10.4) is completely stable. There might be an app or
two crashing now and then, but that's not on OS X's shoulders, rather the apps
themselves. I think the only issue I had was that one of my universities
WiFi's became unstable, but more factors might play in since they use a lot of
custom configurations for security on that one.

I'm rather interested in what might be causing what OP describes? Since it
doesn't just affect the owners PC, it must be transmitting something over the
network. Could this perhaps be from an application instead, that might have
been affected by internal changes due to the update (someone mentioned the
Photo app)?

------
spike021
My early 2011 Macbook Pro isn't suffering from/causing anything related to
this issue as far as I can tell. Is it possible it's only happening with
certain wireless chipsets?

~~~
thrownaway2424
Not observed on my late-2009 iMac, either. It has an older bluetooth card that
doesn't work with airdrop.

------
gtaylor
This is probably a baseless notion, but having nursed along a mid-2010 Macbook
Pro alongside a Linux/Windows Desktop, I find myself thinking that the Linux
WiFi situation is now the easiest of the three (on Ubuntu, at least). Of
course, there's a huge caveat about hardware selection, but I am always
careful to buy something that I know to have decent driver support.

Strange times.

~~~
masmullin
Why do you say strange? Linux has thousands, maybe tens of thousands of
developers working on the kernel. The pace of progress is absolutely
monumental.

This isn't strange, this is inevitability. OSX and Windows simply cannot
compete, Im rather shocked that they are still trying.

~~~
unfunco
Just under 5k contributors in total[0] – There's likely a lot less than that
working on it actively, and the number working on the Linux kernel full-time
will be much lower than that also.

[0]
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/contributors)

Both Microsoft and Apple can compete.

~~~
colechristensen
This is likely not an accurate representation of who is actually working on
the kernel. Whole teams of people might work on a patch which gets bundled up
into a single commit.

------
yborg
so, probably uncool to not be an Apple-basher now, but I am on 10.010.3 and
run 100% WiFi and Bt at home from my 2012 Mini to an Apple Airport 802.11ac
base as well as a 2012 MBP and do not see this level of _TOXICITY_.

We have approx. 15 Macs in the office, all on Yosemite, mostly Retina MBPs
with a couple of older laptops and have been seeing occasional WiFi dropouts
on machines, although the situation seems to be resolved if the affected
machine is restarted.

I'm not disputing that people may be getting a _TOXIC_ ride on Yosemite, but
the hyperbole seems a little extreme.

------
ghshephard
10.10.3 is not the worst; the transition from 10.6.8 to 10.7 was the worst
migration Apple ever made. I routinely got kernel panics from three or four
different causes, poor wifi connectivity, etc....

A number of commenters are saying good things about 10.8 - I've been on 10.8.5
for several months - and, for the first time in a couple years, I actually
have to deliberately power cycle My MBAir to put in Security Patches; 10.8.5
is just that stable. I'm constantly amazed to check and see the uptime has
been good for several months. The Beachball of death is (mostly) gone. The
random freezes (with the exception of the Notification Tray Bug, which Apple
hasn't bothered to fix, but they have somehow reduced) are almost completely
gone. And, best of all - I haven't had a Kernel panic in 6+ months.

It's going to be a long, long time before I move off of 10.8.5 - life is to
short to be screwing around with unreliable operating systems.

What I _don 't_ understand - is given that Apple controls the Hardware and the
Software and the Drivers - why do they keep releasing such crappy operating
systems for 6-9 months every year? Why can't they slow down their tempo, and
release a new operating system every other year, but actually release a
quality operating system, the way they release quality hardware?

Marco is absolutely right in [http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-
functional-high-g...](http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-
high-ground) \- Apple is seemingly taking pride in releasing shoddy software
on a rapid pace, which is the antithesis of what you would think they would
want to do to maintain their "quality" brand.

Another problem with Apple - is that the operating system that I would like to
put my friends and family on, 10.8.5, is hard to do. At least with Windows,
you can buy them a Windows 7 CD for $45, and give them a stable place to
start.

------
phaed
So glad I don't have to deal with this kinda bullshit anymore. Clear skies on
Windows 8.1.

~~~
narrator
I'm loving it on my Ubuntu laptop. Linux used to be a pain in the old days,
but now just about everything works.

~~~
chrisper
Do you have Ubuntu on a Mac?

------
monksy
You could just plug into the ethernet.... oh wait... you can't do that with a
few of their models.

------
sergiotapia
So this is why my wifi absolutely sucks after I switched to my Macbook Air.

How do I fix this? I need my Macbook for work, but I also don't want my
internet experience to suffer for it.

~~~
heimatau
Download an older OS. Like 10.10.2. Link:
[https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1786?locale=en_US](https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1786?locale=en_US)

~~~
inguinalhernia
If the Mac supports it, OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) is the most stable release out
there.

------
HaloZero
I had to turn off my Bluetooth to get my wifi working normally. That resolved
the majority of the issues but strangely it was only on my older laptop.
Macbook Pro Mid 2012

------
milesf
I'm using iStat Menus5 and Little Snitch, and am not experiencing the same
issues. My MacBook Pro is the penultimate 17", and although I still lose Wifi
randomly (under Yosemite and Mavericks) my machine's running acceptably,
although the stable seems to have steadily degraded since Snow Leopard, which
has been my favourite iteration of OSX so far.

Really not impressed with Apple as of late.

------
ratsimihah
Not quite compatible with a recently released vulnerability affecting
10.10.2-. Like a choice between eating and being eaten.

[https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-
backdoor-...](https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-backdoor-api-
to-root-privileges-in-apple-os-x/)

~~~
userbinator
IMHO local privilege escalation on a supposedly personal and single-user
computer isn't quite as bad in comparison to DoS'ing the network.

There's also claims that 10.10.3 doesn't fix the vulnerability either:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/19/apple-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/19/apple-
fails-to-patch-rootpipe/)

[http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/21/os-x-rootpipe-vulnerability-
se...](http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/21/os-x-rootpipe-vulnerability-security/)

Waiting for 10.10.4 might be the best choice for now...

~~~
ratsimihah
Good point!

------
reubenmorais
Luckily I haven't experienced any of the WiFi issues people have with 10.10.*,
but the last update was still toxic, for a different reason: I had to disable
all third party kexts or I would get kernel panics every 10 minutes or so.
Incredibly frustrating.

PSA: If you use VPN software, Smoothmouse, or Hamachi, consider not updating
to 10.10.3.

~~~
jawngee
That's not really Apple's doing though.

Hamachi has always been a buggy thing. I would get kernel panics in 10.8.x
with it. I stopped using it because of that.

------
zanny
Ubuntu called - 15.04 just came out, they replaced the whole init system,
pretty flawless. 14.04 still great. Pick your flavor, KDE is amazing now. And
Canonical is doing the same thing Apple is, ignoring the desktop to focus on
mobile! But at least it just stays reliable rather than getting worse every
release...

------
jafingi
I have had huge issues with WiFi on my rMBP 15" late-2013 on Yosemite.
Mavericks had no problems. At home it's fine, but at work (with a huge amount
of access points/repeaters), I can only connect to the WiFi 1/10 times.

Have tried creating a new location and delete all access points and re-
connect. Nothing works..

10.6 were the best Mac OS of all times. Super stable, no nonsens release.
Since then, it's just gotten buggy, unreliable and slow. Really hope that
Apple steps up the game with 10.11. I don't need new features. Make a release
like 10.6 where you polish everything and make it rock stable.

------
lobster_johnson
Check if Photos is uploading to iCloud. Users have reporting this completely
saturating their Internet connection. I doubt it's related to wifi drivers at
all, just lack of upload throttling.

------
tmpaccnteja
i've been on the 10.10.4 beta and its been much better.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Where can the 10.10.4 beta be fetched from?

~~~
istvan__
[https://appleseed.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/](https://appleseed.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thank you!

------
achou
Have you tried using Apple's Network Link Conditioner (See
[http://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/](http://nshipster.com/network-
link-conditioner/)) to limit bandwidth use by the rogue machine? After turning
on iCloud Photo Library, my network was hammered for days until I used this
utility to limit bandwidth usage to a fraction of what was available.

------
marcamillion
I have 10.10.3 on my MBP and have been experiencing eratic WIFI for the last
few weeks too. However, I don't use Photos and I never enabled iCloud backup
(on either my iPad or my MBP).

So it seems like the OP may be onto something re: the actual update.

Updating to 10.10.4 shortly, hopefully that makes things better.

------
solve
And what's with the kernel_task that's suddenly taking up most of the RAM on
older Macbook Airs?

------
istvan__
I have already downgraded to mavericks 3 days ago because of the countless
problems 10.10 has currently.

------
X-Istence
I've got a MacBook Pro Retina 15" late 2013, no issues. I also have an early
2012 Mac Mini, also no issues.

Every time people complain about wifi issues on OS X, I've either been very
lucky, or just don't have right combination of wireless devices to cause the
issue.

------
sjg007
QA has noticeably dropped, but it is a difficult job. WiFi is notorious, lots
of buggy implementations of the same standard both on the access point and the
laptop. And many times the work place WiFi won't update to the latest firmware
that fixes the problem.

------
erichurkman
We've seen something similar with a 10 - 25 MacBooks connected at once on an
Airport Extreme, and I wonder if it's related – as it all worked fine before,
for months.

Is the solution to downgrade everyone to 10.10.2 or upgrade everyone to
10.10.3?

------
uptown
I've got the problem of OSX filling up gigabytes of space with no rhyme or
reason. One minute I'll have 10gb fee then I'll have 900mb free. Then it'll
free up again.

~~~
AYBABTME
You're running out of memory and OS X is swapping to disk.

~~~
lucaspiller
I'm having this - OP check the Memory Pressure section in Activity Monitor.
The annoying thing is all I've got running are Spotify, Skype, Chrome (with a
couple of tabs) and iTerm. I guess 4GB isn't enough anymore...

~~~
stevekinney
I've got 16GB and the same thing happens to me. It will expand to take up all
the RAM and disk space available.

------
dropit_sphere
Ack! That explains it. Had to root around for a 25-ft. cable...

------
voltagex_
Anyone want to take the plunge and post a PCAP afterwards?

------
javert
> Its absolutely criminal that applying a recommended update with security
> critical fixes in it should turn my computer into a DoS device for my local
> network.

Let's be careful. Extremely irresponsible and horrible? Yes. Criminal? No.

We don't want to give the EU any more ideas about who to bully next. It could
be me or you (in effect if not literally).

If you've signed a contract with Apple that there will not be breakage, then
it's a matter for _civil_ (not criminal) court.

------
craigyk
My take is that it is photos uploading. I experienced the same issue and had
to pause the photos upload when at home.

------
joelbondurant
MacOSX is the WindowsME of unix.

------
carlob
So much for the promise of the new macbook that does everything wirelessly…

------
eccstartup
Quick fixing is not Apple.

