This has been mentioned quite a few times but Apple's software quality seriously has taken a turn for the worse in the last few years.
I've usually updated my macs to the latest OS's within a couple of weeks of release, but Catalina is the first time where I still have yet to update.
Stories of bugs such as this as well as mail messages getting blanked out and unrecoverable makes me actually scared to upgrade.
With Catalina, I'm also not seeing any major benefit to upgrading. The features list is thin and no 32bit programs kills a lot of random stuff that I can't find a quick replacement for. This is the first time I'm not upgrading macOS in 15+ years.
The keyboards are mediocre at best anyway. My MS sculpt is the best keyboard I've used and try to bring it with me even if I'm just using my mbp as a laptop
I'm still running Mojave on my desktop (iMac 5k.) I have the occasional 32-bit, obsolete app I run, and don't want to deal with the upgrades right now.
I have never worked at apple but I know a few people that do and did dating back to the 70s. They have a culture of team independence, which is good and bad. Every team gets to choose their own language, tools, and process. This leads to an enormous amount of fragmentation across Apple. Additionally, there's a lot of secrecy and territorial behavior around products and teams. Finally, a lot of Apple's resources are devoted to iOS and mobile hardware and AR and VR and ARM CPUs and all these things that are not macbooks. Then on top Apple management wants regularly scheduled software releases, which is really hard to do with all those cultural and structural barriers in place.
Regularly scheduled software releases makes no goddamn sense to me. Why are MacOS, iOS, iPad OS, and tvOS supposed to ship at the same time? Moreover, does anyone really care if these get updated once per year? Especially tvOS. I really wish Apple would move to releasing new software "about" once every 24 months and just use the extra time to test.
And for image reasons, it must be "major" release instead of minor release for hw support (like many commercial OSes did in the past, I think even macOS)
Not sure myself though I’m sure books will in future be written about “the early signs of Apple’s demise”.
My MacbookAir 6,2 (mid-2013) was screwed after the 10.15.4 update (not the supplemental). The SSD was totally not recognised. I’ve tried SMC and NVRAM resets numerous times and remote Recovery. The drive is now invisible. I opened it up to reseat it (cleaning pins and socket) to no avail.
Fortunately I’ve got a 256GB SDXC card which I’ve installed Pop!_OS on - which has convinced me that now’s as good a time as any to extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem (which I’m all in on - iCloud, Apple Music etc). My next laptop will be non-Apple. First non-Apple hardware in this house since 2003.
I’ll try swapping the drive with my daughter’s - she has the same model. At least I’ll know whether it’s the drive or the logic board. Then I can sell the bits.
The screen on my MacbookPro13,1 (late 2016) recently gave out. I needed a replacement but I was not convinced by any of the current Apple offerings -- I can't stand the stupid touch bar on the Pros, and the new MBA didn't sufficiently excite me.
The usual build-to-order options like Dell or Lenovo being backordered due to the pandemic, I walked into a Costco and bought a LG Gram 17[0]. This is the first time I bought a laptop off the shelf, and the first time my primary laptop has not been a Mac, in over a decade. I installed Xubuntu 18.04 LTS on it with no fanfare and have been quite happy with it since.
Hi Wingy. Sorry this is two weeks late. Life intervened.
I swapped mine and my daughter’s SSD’s and it’s definitely the drive and not the logic board in my case. That’s no guarantee for your friend but you never know your luck.
I was kind of hoping it would be the logic board to self-justify a new laptop. Now I’m thinking I’ll get the cheapest 256 I can get and nurse the laptop along for as long as I can.
But I’m committed to switching to Linux. Still exploring distros.
The iPad’s software keyboard is still buggy as hell. The software keyboard, the part of the OS that the user will interact with the most, and the part of the OS that is required to be the most stable, frequently just completely breaks and requires a full device reboot to fix.
That, to me, is insane. It shows how shit the project management must be if they cannot even prioritize fixing critical bugs in the most important parts of the OS over releasing some useless feature that most users will never touch.
I'll qualify this by saying I haven't owned an iPad since the 2nd gen, but how are the 3d party keyboards on iOS? Do they limit them like they do with non-Safari browsers?
I remember one of the main reasons I "jailbroke" my iPad was so I could install an improved/alternate software keyboard, but I remember reading they added the option officially a while back.
I'm curious: are they artificially limited or do they all just suck?
What bugs do you see in the iPad software keyboard?
iOS keyboard input and text selection has been wonky for quite a while, and from what I've tried of Android, it doesn't feel much better on the other side of the fence either. Why can't Apple -or- Google get such basic interactivity right?
Recently moved from android to an iPhone. The one that gets me while typing: I can’t tap and place the cursor in the middle of a word! Say you mistype a word, you cannot edit that word. You have to delete the entire word or tap and hold to get highlighting and then drag the highlight together to cover one letter on the word and then you can delete and get your cursor in the middle of the word. Insane.
Press and hold on the spacebar. Wait a second. Then you can move the cursor left/right from the spacebar.
iOS is generally quite good at these things. Like any new platform, you can't expect it the UX to be identical to an old platform that you're more familiar with.
I think my gripes so far are around discoverability. How did you know to click and hold the space bar? Now that I know, I like it. Never would have know otherwise. Drag from the bottom left and up to dismiss an app, do the same but go sideways to get to history of apps, etc.
Not sure what to tell you. I did not dismiss any tips that I can recall. I recall how to create folders and drag apps to it from onboarding. Mostly, I have to ask someone or search Google to find out how to do the most basic of things.
that's subjective. It's not an additional step, it's a different way of doing it. I personally feel like it's better. I dont have to worry about not placing the cursor at the right place. I just click it and move the cursor around where I want.
there are a really large number of things i can no longer accomplish with ios 13 text selection model that i used to be able to do ... the easiest test case for finding all the flaws is trying to edit a url in safari.
ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...
i would really love for someone to fix this issue
-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?
Yep, this is an iOS 13 feature. Prior to this, hard-pressing the space bar was the correct solution (although it still works on devices with 3D Touch, and long-touch works on newer models).
For me the keyboard will sometimes not load properly. The keyboard just shows up as an empty pane. And that's a sign that my iPad is going to be all grindy and slow until I reboot it.
I also have this bug, and a couple more. When you use the smaller floating keyboard at some point the keyboard starts to jump to the lower left corner. Swipe to type doesn’t work anymore.
I also have a bug with their hardware keyboard. After a couple days of usage the keyboard can get unresponsive and the § key starts to magically appear in the next text field that gets focus, at least 10–20 times, as it would be stuck. Reconnecting the hardware keyboard usually fixes this issue, but it’s still annoying. The restarts that are required for software keyboard bugs are worse, though.
I suspect it’s the need to deliver a new OS every year.
Apple used to maintain a 2 year (or longer) cadence earlier.
I suspect the first few months after each release used to be focused on hardening it. With the yearly release cycle they probably have to shift over to working on the next release almost immediately.
According to HN threads within the lifetime of any given MacOS release, the last acceptable MacOS was System 8.
I'm running a 6-year old MB Pro, updated within the first week of every releases' public beta availability, never reinstalled. I use sudo far too liberally to be good for system health, including (as long as it was possible) deleting all sorts of files in /System, /private, etc. when I run out of space and believe they're superfluous via cursory inspection ( i. e. sudo rm -rf /System/<asterisk>/{AMD,<asterisk>SCSI}<asterisk>).
And... it just works? I've never lost any data. I've typed in my WIFI password once and not changed anything since. Time Machine recently stopped working, and I had to follow the cable because I didn't remember where the HD actually was (taped beneath a cupboard, as it turns out; the power cable had somehow unplugged). Catalina did throw up a few permission dialogs after installation, but that took less than five minutes, even though I run a few low-level utilities (karabiner etc).
There are certainly some annoying UI bugs or inconsistencies. When you open an ePub in Books and immediately press cmd+f, for example, the search field loses focus repeatedly while the book opens. And why is cmd+f the shortcut for search almost everywhere, but not Keychain?
I recently installed Linux on a Desktop for some Cuda work, for the first in 15 years or so. Based on what I had read (mostly on HN), I expected Linux on the desktop to have made vast progress over that time. I'm sorry to say that it is, still, a complete disaster by almost any measure. I have no idea why the popular narrative sees the two anywhere close to each other.
Case in point: My installation of Ubuntu, using defaults, had an application menu with categories "Preferences", "Setting", "Utilities, and "System". Those all mean (almost) the same thing! There are two package managers now (apt and I forgot the new one's name), each with abpout five GUI and three CLI applications for installing packages. But both sometimes installed three year old versions of standard software (calibre, I believe). Good thing Homebrew is now available for Linux, because somehow they have no trouble keeping up.
Font sizes, margins, and contrast are all over the place. There are dozens of color schemes, yes. But much like unhappy families, each one fails in its own manner: with both a dark and a light one, I encountered parts of the UI where you'd suddenly have light buttons with light (invisible) text. Or, IIRC, light text on dark backgrounds. Which works -- until there's a link in the text.
There seem to be five different subsystems between my mouse and the desktop. None of seemed to allow adjusting scroll wheel acceleration. (Even pointer acceleration felt wrong to me. And even though I found the system of partial differentials that seems to be the official interface for adjustments, I failed to find the sweet spot. But this might be an issue of familiarity more than objective quality).
>deleting all sorts of files in /System, /private, etc. when I run out of space and believe they're superfluous via cursory inspection ( i. e. sudo rm -rf /System/<asterisk>/{AMD,<asterisk>SCSI}<asterisk>)
It's not recent. Their software has always been second rate. So is their hardware - just look at their "Pro" lineup that came out in 2019 with a 2 year old GPU in it for $50k lol.
They're also not doing us any favors with the way they're building their hardware these days. If a firmware update was to brick the system board in a Mac from 15 years ago (or most PCs from today), replacing the system board might cost 10% of the total value of the machine.
If the same thing happens today where everything is soldered and epoxied together, you practically lose the whole machine and all the data on it. Woof.
This is interesting. I sat down at my machine on Thursday morning, and it was entirely unresponsive. It had warned me about installing updates the previous evening, but I've done this many times without an issue, and regardless, they are always complete by morning. I waited a minute or two for any sign of life (beyond the fans running), and then held power. I heard the unpleasant sound of the fans spinning up to high RPM and then shutting off rapidly. I waited a few seconds and then held power again. The machine showed a slow progress bar, but then finally I saw "26 minutes remaining" below it. I was pretty surprised that the update was running, but I figured it had just started late or hung, and ran a bit later into the working hours.
This article makes me reevaluate that thought.
Coincidentally, one of my colleagues had warned the team about installing macOS updates, since he was having repeated issues with kernel panics on the original 10.15.4 update.
I hope Apple can get some of this together a little better going forward.
I had a similar issue to yours when I manually ran this update on my 16". It froze on a black screen, after doing the BridgeOS part of the update. I had to force it down. When it started, it continued the update and, thankfully, everything worked.
However, I'm still having kernel panics after the Supplemental update. But interestingly, they only happen when the machine is supposedly sleeping, with the shell closed. I kid you not. I will have it sitting there on my end table in the living room, shut for over an hour, and all of the sudden it will reboot with the lid closed (I know because I have the startup chime enabled). I've never had a Mac kernel panic while supposedly sleeping. This is so f*cked.
Bugs me too. Your best bet is launchd which solves the problem, but it is a bit of pain to write job definition property lists. More here:
https://www.launchd.info
Ironically -- I think this bug is fixed in a like 10.15.3 or so. Eitherway a cron I set up over a year ago before I realized this bug has started mailing me since I updated to Catalina.
Ah, thanks. That jogged my memory. I did turn off power nap a long time ago, but my laptop still kept waking up at night anyhow. But I just checked, and now it seems to work as advertised.
> Mobile Device Management can remotely lock and wipe your Mac.
I appreciate the transparency here. Outside of API documentation, a lot of plain-language information doesn't go in-depth enough about MDM capabilities.
Yes, I know this, but when a Mac does this, it does it only to run routine Apple code, stuff that should not, under any circumstances, cause a kernel panic. And up until Catalina, that it never has, barring binary corruption or defective hardware.
In this case, the kernel panic seems to be related to the Intel Iris video driver.
So did my Mac and my wife's Mac. I don't see the irony. This probably affects a small subsets of Macs [1] and probably still the count of successful updates is much higher for Apple Macs than Hackintoshes. But yes, if you cherry-pick anecdotes, you can get any outcome you want.
[1] Which is still terrible, these things should just not happen. Bad quality control from Apple' side and inexcusable for > 1000 Euro 'premium' computers.
I think companies are pushing updates way too aggressively to those who have auto update on.
Is there some reason why phased release isn't more common among OS/firmware updates?
Auto update does not have to mean "update my device the day new versions are out".
Edit: Is this related to public disclosure of security bugs? If so, the community should change their standard so that public disclosure doesn't happen until a week after the update is available. This would allow for phased rollouts.
What OS X and Windows, IOS, Android and probably lots of others need, is Long Term Support releases. I'm so sick and tired of my phone and computer switching up major features and UI every year, because some UX person wants to not get fired.
Releasing a new major version of your OS yearly is insane.
On windows you can choose to get feature updates with a 4 month delay if you have windows pro (set updates to "Semi-Annual Channel" instead of "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)", and yes microsoft are indeed terrible with naming things). I never had issues with windows updates on that branch. There is also windows enterprise long term servicing branch (LTSB), which gets feature updates every 3 years (but is meant more for things like point of sale systems, not for regular PC's).
On macOS you can stay one major release behind. So, stay on mojave until the successor to catalina is released, then upgrade to catalina. You still get security fixes and full software ecosystem support, but far fewer issues with buggy updates.
On android and iOS you don't really have good options to my knowledge.
Second the recommendation to stay on Mojave. I do this for my $WORK laptop and it still gets back-ported security updates. $WORK's IT department has advised Apple users to hold off upgrading to 10.15 and it seems they have good reason to continue dispensing that advice, still...!
Heck, I do that with my personal laptop. Feeling pretty happy having read these comments that I never took the leap to Catalina.
I feel pretty sure this must be common because I still see apps and infrastructure, even last month, coming out with updates related to Catalina compatibility.
It sucks though. I have a Google Pixel phone and never hesitate to apply updates, I even look forward to them. I don't think I've ever had an Android phone experience the sort of severe regressions that occur regularly with Apple updates.
I've been a MBP user for a long time, but I'm really starting to wonder if it's time to take a leap soon. I've been using this laptop for maybe a year and:
1. I'm scared to upgrade to the latest OS
2. The screen's coating has been damaged and has key-print impressions on it. This always happens and Apple seem incapable of fixing it.
3. The latest butterfly keyboard has at least not broken on me for 8 months or so, but the options, C and A keys have worn through and now have holes in them. This started happening a few generations ago and now seems like a regular problem that I'm just supposed to accept.
4. Very soon after getting it something happened to the metal such that it has a large discolouration on the bottom left, of a type I've never seen before. Nothing seems to fix it.
5. The screen routinely gets a yellow splotch in one of the corners if the laptop has been in my backpack for a while.
The problem is that despite not even really having improved for years, macOS is probably still the best OS out there. Linux on laptops has never worked well - my colleagues who try to use it routinely have issues with webcams not working properly. Windows laptops seem to vary wildly in quality and many of them have stupid design flaws like putting the webcam at the bottom of the screen instead of the top, coming loaded with crapware, anti-virus products that cripple performance, Windows is still a rats nest of weird problems under the hood. And their way to make it better for developers is to just bundle Linux?
I really wish there was more competition in the laptops-for-technical-people space.
FWIW I put ubuntu LTS on my thinkpad T460p and everything worked flawlessly except for the fingerprint reader. For thinkpads that seems to be the rule: everything works except for the fingerprint reader.
If you want good linux support on a laptop you need to do some research, but there are options. Thinkpads, XPS, ... They’re just not that much cheaper than a macbook if you want comparable specs.
Yes, but it's Enterprise only. Everyone else is forced to act as Microsofts QA department, inplace of their long since dismantled actual QA department.
Been working fine for me since October 2018 for dual boot gaming & firmware updates. It will update to the latest version of LTSC when you start up.
Works with the latest hardware too, I am using it with a 5700xt (released last July, purchased in December) and a Ryzen 7 (also released last year). Only thing missing is the new Microsoft Store, if you search for it there's a repo on github which will let you install it.
For all the Windows 10 ISOs you need to use Rufus instead of normal dd/cat the ISO to a USB stick (doesn't work with dd/cat). Rufus works in a VirtualBox VM with USB passthrough. During the setup, select that you don't have a license key and then activate it later as mentioned in that post.
They do. Since Microsoft already puts all the effort into maintaining this branch, why the heck isn’t it available to normal consumers who want it? Heck, why do they keep telling enterprises to pretty pretty please not use it?
Is Microsoft concerned users would like it too much? Maybe that’s a sign that their constant feature updates aren’t actually desirable and they should back off.
> If so, the community should change their standard so that public disclosure doesn't happen until a week after the update is available.
The update being available is public disclosure! For an experienced reverse engineer, comparing the files before and after the update is usually enough to pinpoint the security issue.
I can't seem to be able to find a link to it right now but there was even this one project/website that dumped the bindiffs for each Windows Update and their disassembly.
Don't most iOS bugs these days require multiple security exploits in order to work? I'm not sure it's always that simple to find a reliable exploit just based on what code has changed (because lots of code has changed).
If there is an obvious to find, easily-exploitable bug, the update could be pushed to everyone (the way updates are pushed today).
There is a balance to strike here. If issues with auto update cause enough people turn auto update off, I'm not sure it's helping security.
Finally - Apple already has a beta programs including public betas. Are those binaries not already used to find exploits?
Essentially, I'm not convinced a phased update (with public security disclosure slightly later) would lead to worse security than we have today.
Doesn't matter what the security community does - The security fixes are often obvious enough in the binary delta (Comparing all of the changed files on one system to another) that cracking teams can discover the flaws that were fixed within 24h, and have exploits available in 48. That's what drives the pace of these updates - The very real fear that fixes reveal your hand to the malware community.
Beta programs are about new features, not about security fixes. Those that are included are typically incidental. They're more likely to be deliberately held back/in a separate branch from beta programs so as not to reveal them.
macOs management tools for enterprises like Jamf allow you to explicitly set deferral for updates for 30 days to avoid situations like this. I may actually set this for my company since we try and patch within two weeks of a general security patch release.
2018 MBP, Using it on battery, saw I was at 20% plugged it in, noticed it was running like crap so I started closing applications, restarted it.
Still running like crap after reboot, also noticed fans were not spinning figured maybe an SMC reset is in order when
I realized it was at 2% battery, had not been charging, status said it was plugged in but not charging.
Powered it off to do the SMC reset and I can get nothing from it now, not a thing, no sounds, no signs of life, no fans, no apple logo, no clicks from the trackpad.
I think this qualifies as a brick.
Indeed. The problem was 10.15.4 to start with. One reason to roll out the supplemental update was because 10.15.4 broke Facetime compatibility with older iOS and macOS versions (which is particularly bad in the current crisis).
Maybe they shouldn't have released 10.15.4 right now, but instead only the security fixes in this release. But they had to push out that release to support the new MacBook Air.
Another problem with such reports is that it is hard to get an idea of how widespread this problem is. And whether the problem (perhaps) already occurred with previous Catalina updates, but is now picked up more.
I am quite the Apple apologist, but Catalina is awful.
1. As seen here, it's a bugfest.
2. For user-facing features, it brings…Sidecar? And a bunch of half-assed Catalyst apps, I suppose.
3. Such an exciting new set of security features—really met what I have to guess was their goal to quickly train me to click OK on every single dialog to get to work.
For 3, what it's taught me is that I have to load a video conference, go into the privacy settings, allow use of camera and microphone, then exit the video conference and load it again before anyone can see or hear me.
I'm a consultant and talk to multiple clients all with their own video conference solution and having to do this every time I join a call where a client is using a different video conference solution is very unprofessional. The worst was using Teams where I had to close my browser before I could join the conference, after I had already queued up everything I needed for the call. So now everyone is waiting on me to re-open everything and reset the state for the demo.
They’re not asking again but asking for the first time is what is disruptive because it forces you to close whatever application is requesting permissions. It’s sucks when WebEx does it but at least that only makes you close WebEx. Still a really poor design choice but not nearly as disruptive as browser-based tools that make you close your browser.
Is there any actual quantitative evidence this update is any worse than any average update? The article presents three forum posts as evidence... which isn't evidence.
I assume every update ever has messed up a handful of people's computers, even if just coincidentally (e.g. the computer was going to die on the next reboot no matter what).
If thousands of people were complaining on Twitter that would be one thing. But since there aren't, and considering that Apple hasn't pulled the update...
2019 imac getting kernel panics when going to sleep.
It seems silly if you're not affected. But now that it's hit me, i'm about to go back to mojave. If it was just a weird bug, I could deal with it. But to kernel panic is a big deal to me. I cant trust the computer to not break if I walk away from it for 10 minutes.
I guess I could turn off sleep, but that doesnt seem like a solution to me. To keep it running all the time so it doesnt break? nah.
This could very well be a hardware or deeper issue. I had a similar but more specific issue with my 2018 mbp, and managed to isolate the issue after quite a bit of trial and error. They replaced it with a 2019 model brand new. I think for me it was specific to letting the battery drain completely, then closing it and plugging it into power and waiting a while. I'd open to a computer that had kernal panicked. It could be related to deep sleep/hibernate, where the contents of ram is written to the ssd and then restored on wake. You can test this probably by setting a hibernate timer and then testing what happens if it sleeps for just under and just over that time.
I reproduced it by eliminating aspects of the scenario and combing through logs. For example, for a long time I only knew it was happening sometime after the laptop went to sleep, but that's all. After paying attention to my patterns, I isolated out the case where the laptop would sleep only for a few minutes on or off power. Then I did the same thing but either pulled the power cable or plugged it in after it went to sleep. Then I tried variants of those after letting it sleep for a long time. Nothing was reproducible for a very long time until I noticed that the specific case of first using it till the battery was dead, then letting it sit for a while, then plugging it in and then opening the lid caused the kernel panic. It persisted through two screen replacements and one motherboard replacement if memory serves. Not totally sure how that happened, but it could have been a faulty SSD or something.
It was extremely satisfying to finally isolate it to 100% reproducibility. Peak of my career right there.
What's "qualitative" in this context? No one (outside of Apple, who isn't sharing) is in a position to run a true assessment of the failure rate of every update.
I think it's fair to say this issue is relatively rare, but there are definitely more than three reports of it happening. Heck, some people in this thread chimed in to say they got bit the update.
I thought this would be about the 10.15.4 update, which had known problems, but instead it's the supplemental hotfix that was supposed to address them:
"This supplemental update for macOS 10.15.4 Catalina, released Wednesday (April 8), was meant to resolve issues created by the 10.15.4 update in late March."
My 2019 mbp was bricked with the previous update. Apple support said that they need to take a physical look, but all of their stores are closed until further notice.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And by “bricked” I mean - no signs of life whatsoever
Odd, this seems to be happening across the industry and is now either reported better or just more prevalent. Besides bricks (well, is it a brick if you can recover?) we have seen post-update BSOD's, data loss, browsers going bad, settings getting reset on various operating systems of the big vendors out there. I know that it isn't like software 'used to be perfect' but this type of defect feels bigger than it used to be.
1. The OS update policies became more "agile". Both Windows and macOS starts to update the OS more often than ever. macOS moved to an annual update from biannual, Windows 10 switched to a subscription-like model.
2. They laid off the testing team and stopped testing on actual PCs in favor of VMs. [1] It makes sense considering the broken updates are often more low-level bugs that cannot be caught by VMs.
It's another case of focusing on the short term to save money. In the long term it damages their reputation and some frustrated businesses/users might start to consider moving away from their products if a viable alternative exists.
Unfortunately there’s only two players in this game (I doubt mass consumption of linux any time soon). So, if they both suck, neither loses the reputation game.
was meant to resolve issues created by the 10.15.4 update in late March
The "fix some bugs, add some new ones" trend has certainly gotten more common within the past few years. I still remember when the official advice was not to install updates unless you were experiencing the issues it was to fix, but that wasn't really applicable to security fixes, and now official advice seems to be "always install" regardless of security or indeed usefulness.
I don't think it's more prevalent. I think it's more notable precisely because we've gotten so used to our devices and data being stable. Don't forget that in the past it was pretty much expected you'd lose or break something when upgrading your OS, and that you could pretty much count on physical hard drive failure resulting in data loss at some point in the life of your PC. BSOD's especially were almost certainly more prevalent in the bad old days of Windows. Looking just at Mac, don't forget about when PRAM resets were part of the normal debug flow.
I've experienced it myself with one of the Android apps i use (a VoIP client). The latest update killed my ability to call out through my office PBX, and I had to fish the old version out of one of my backups, since the Play Store oh-so-helpfully doesn't let you install older versions of an app.
Also more software systems enable "automatic updates". Whereas in the past only those that chose to upgrade were affected, now everyone is affected except for those that chose not to enable automatic updates.
Well, that's it for Catalina then. Although I really want full Xcode 11.4/Swift UI/Swift 5.2 and my MacBook Pro a Catalina upgrade is just too much of a risk. On top of all the previous Catalina woes Apple should be hanging their heads in shame.
I managed to get round this by copying
Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/13.4
from the latest Xcode.xib into my installed Xcode package.
Over the last few years Xcode has dropped support for older versions of macOS very aggressively. It requires upgrading to a new major version within the year that the new version came out, and quite often requires the latest minor version as well.
I think that Apple should take advantage of the lockdowns and focus just on fixing things.
They don't need to ship anything new and they have the perfect excuse to focus on improving both their OS and their processes that allowed such flawed things to reach their users.
I wish macOS would just drop back to major releases every 2-3 years. Sure, drop a point release in September to add compatibility with whatever new feature iOS has gained, but my Mac is the computer I do work on. I need it to always be reliable.
Right now it seems the only way to do that is wait a long time before installing any update they push.
I absolutely agree. The action of pushing out major updates every year has lead to a drop in quality. They never get a chance to fix last years bugs because they are working on next years features.
That's not a fundamental issue though. Chrome pushes new features every six weeks. Android updates every year and doesn't suffer these kinds of problems.
You absolutely can do regular updates that are high quality. You just can't do them in an environment that's deadline driven, or which gives PMs too much power over what dev teams work on.
There were some fairly significant changes. Two big ones off the top of my head were dropping support for 32bit binaries, and moving the entire kernel to read-only memory. Both imply broad changes.
There was a major change in architecture: In spring 2018, beginning with the development cycle for Catalina Apple's developers started to move into the Spaceship, the new office building with open office "pods". ;)
And what has users gained by that? For the past 5 years or so, I don't exactly know anything worth it from users' perspective. Getting third party app updates are enough to increase productivity.
Although this change may not be immediately visible it does increase security a fair bit (malware cannot embed themselves or replace system files) and also prevents accidental deletion.
Apple made large strides in the last few years improving security, e.g. by introducing SIP, but also by offering fine-grained permissions for camera, mic, etc. access. APFS created its own road bumps, but was a long overdue replacement of HFS+.
IMO there were also some nice user-visible changes, such as dark mode, replacing iTunes by several separate applications, and dynamic desktop.
I agree that there are also superfluous changes or steps back, I am still grumpy that they replaced Spaces by Mission Control. I don't care for all the deep iCloud Drive integration and think it is unfair to the competition.
I strongly disagree that there are no useful new features the last five years. The problem is more the lack of quality control. That said, I started using macOS when 10.5 came out, which also had its fair share of ugly bugs (e.g. serious problems with maintaining WiFi connections).
No this was done years ago in 10.7. Spaces was awesome and super configurable. But they combined it into Mission control and made it much simple but less useful.
I was using since 10.3 and my, 10.5 introduced Quick Look, Time Machine, Boot Camp, Spaces and folder popup in dock which made me feel it has become totally good enough for daily use. Then 10.6 optimized the entire OS when I was surprised that a new OS release actually required less disk space to install and more performant on a same hardware.
I agree some of those security features are good to have but it's like they forgot about adding anything worthy from users' perspective.
Then 10.6 optimized the entire OS when I was surprised that a new OS release actually required less disk space to install and more performant on a same hardware.
This was nice, though it has to be said that the disk space reduction was not because of real optimizations. They removed support for PowerPC in 10.6, so the included applications are not fat/universal binaries anymore. They also removed printer drivers and Rosetta (binary PPC emulation) from the default install (which became an add-on).
Of course, still nice nonetheless if you didn't have a PPC Mac or didn't use PPC applications.
Given that Apple released separate OS install discs and update packages for PPC vs Intel, why were they installing fat binaries of built-in software anyway?
For 3rd party apps universal binaries made complete sense as a way of simplifying app distribution, but that doesn’t extend to the OS.
Heck, do Intel Windows 10 installs include ARM copies of every binary now? I hope not...
Actually, it does. Third party apps are still very good. I cannot think about using Windows for web development for quite a while. The OS would be fine if it won't get in the way.
Is this something especially prevalent in this update? Pretty much every single one borks someone's Mac, so I'm curious if there's something new: this article seemed light on details.
I had a problem with the latest iOS update too: after installing 13.4.1 it booted to a white screen with „swipe up to upgrade“ at the bottom. Swiping up crashed the device. Every couple of minutes it would reboot and be back to the white screen.
I did a factory reset via finder and that worked. As soon as I restored the iCloud backup: back to the white screen.
I had to revert to 13.4 and could then restore the backup. Now I’m afraid to update again … I guess I’ll have to wait until 13.4.2 or 14 are released. Luckily 13.4.1 does not seem to contain security relevant fixes.
13.4 failed on my phone and I had to do a manual clean restore via my Mac. Then 13.4.1 did the same thing and this time I had to do a DFU restore to get it functioning again. Not fun when taking it in to get it fixed is not an option.
I'm still getting freezes on my brand new 2019 MBP due to the still unfixed GPU switching bug and I don't dare install any macOS updates now.
Apple has had a lot of software quality issues in recent years but this is a new low.
I can confirm that the revive via DFU works. It also works over normal USB (instead of usb-c) connector as I used my gf older mac pro late 2015. Be aware that you need at least Mojave 10.14.6+ as the app configurator can't be run/installed on previous versions. There is also a big difference in App configurator 2.10 vs the latest 2.12. On 2.10 (you can find dmg file on internet, but be careful about running untrusted software) you can restore BridgeOS on the chip without wiping the data. In version 2.12 it will wipe all data!
Initially, I tried to restore the system via Virtualbox where I installed Mojave via Apple Configurator but that didn't work as it break during the revival of the last step because of the constant USB de-plugging from host/guest machine during the process. I think just the revival step in 2.12 should also work as it flashes also the bridge os and power it up which should avoid any data loss but don't take this for granted.
Wonder if this update could be related to an issue I had.
Installed Snap Camera a few days ago, was on a video call and when I came off it the green camera light stayed on. Even after quitting Hangouts and Snap Camera.
I restarted and the green light persisted throughout the whole reboot. I then shutdown, and it finally turned off.
After turning it back on, the camera didn't work at all. I uninstalled Snap Camera, reset PRAM, SMC. Nothing seems to fix it. Now thinking it must be a hardware fault, but think I was on the latest update already and just seems like a strange coincidence that it happened almost immediately after I used Snap Camera for the first time.
I've updated my MacBook Pro 2019 before I saw the HN post, the updated went smoothly without any issues (so far).
I've done the same update on my Mac Mini 2018 and now the fan has stopped working after reboot. Tried to reset NVRAM and SMC without any luck... the fan is still unresponsive. Apple diagnostics even confirms this by giving an error code PPF003
If it's any consolation, I really like the keyboard on this latest air. Gave me reason to move off my 2012, the REAL last real macbook imo with everything replaceable/upgrade-able with a Phillips head screwdriver and 20 minutes of your time.
Side poll: Do people automatically download OS updates for their computers? A lesson from my Windows days way back when was never to update anything unless absolutely needed -- computer, phones, etc. "Needed" is loosely defined as "key software that you need to work is no longer working on your older OS, hence you need to upgrade your OS to keep using this key software (sorry!)."
I'm aware of security patches etc, but risk of regular things breaking for little apparent upside has always led me (and most folks I know) to avoid upgrades except in the above-mentioned case.
Edit, not just asking about Windows, but all operating systems, OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, etc.
The default in Windows is to auto update and you have no choice without jumping through hoops or working under a corporate group policy. So at least in terms of Windows, the answer to your question is yes - most people automatically download OS updates.
I love updates! I always update everything as soon as humanly possible. MacUpdater is like a sweet, sweet drug. I find the incidents of things breaking to be fairly low for me, and when things do break, it's usually fairly easy to find a workaround. Thankfully I've never had hardware get bricked before.
Having said that, I may have some kind of mental disorder because the thought of being behind when new software is released is abhorrent to me... Oh, but I don't AUTO update. I like to do it manually so I can read changelogs when available.
... I'm starting to feel like that person who enthusiastically tells everybody how much they love to peel their dead skin off. And everybody gives them 'that look'.
Yes and because they have a bug with egpu they introduced in August, I had to go in Group policy to disable updates until they finally release a fix or my eGPU won't work (it's in beta apparently and will come out after 11 months)... And I was complaining about Apple but this is even worse...
> And I was complaining about Apple but this is even worse...
So a driver bug, affecting a single external device, is worse than completely bricking an entire machine?
Microsoft have had their share of controversies with updates (recent memory is deleting user data folder before they halted the rollout), but they have never made a machine unresponsive to the degree of the multiple anecdotes in this comment section.
HN has some smart folks, but the leeway those folks afford Apple despite their continuous hostile and incompetent behavior is incredible.
I'm not sure this is an issue specific to this update.
The very same description in the Apple forums matches what happened on my work Macbook Pro (a 2018 one if I'm not mistaken) while installing a different update a few months ago.
I won't say this is not an issue specific to this supplemental update, but I'm not buying it is _yet_.
It looks like one of the usual consequences of a system update going wrong. See that the user reports that after fixing this through Recovery Mode, they were asked to install the very same update again, as if nothing had happened. This looks like a rollback.
I wish MacOS was more transparent about what actually happens on those cases. If you had to roll back, let me know. If you could not install because of any reason, let me know.
Apple has historically been lacking on proper documentation. Be that on errors happening during updates or proper documentation of what exactly they have changed in software updates. They have slightly improved, but still not great.
You hear these complaints with every macOS release, but they are probably a very small vocal minority. I've never run into any of the reported problems nor have my 20-odd colleagues.
This is due to Steam adding a new checkbox that requires the game's developer to specifically click an extra checkbox to signify compatibility with Catalina (and optionally, specify if the binary is notarized and/or signed [don't recall which, or is possibly both]).
Steam almost always already knows if the game has a '64-bit macOS depot' configured -- ie ships 64-bit binary for macOS -- though in some cases the 'depot' may be configured as "macOS - All" in which case Steam may not know for sure.
When Catalina released, they defaulted the checkbox to "No" regardless of the game depot configuration. Any remotely recent game that supports macOS almost certainly is shipping a 64-bit binary (been quite a while since OSX was 32-bit only) -- so odds are very good that games supporting macOS will work with macOS Catalina, at least likely for anything in the last 5 years if not longer.
In our case, it took several weeks to find the checkbox to update our store page. In all fairness, Valve sent out an email alerting of the concern ahead of time; we just didn't read it thoroughly enough to realize that the default setting would be "No" even when explicitly having a 64-bit macOS binary configured.
Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve recently had to switch to using the HDMI instead of the Mini DisplayPort to connect a 4K monitor to my mid-2014 MBP, since it wasn’t being recognised (which also means dropping from 60fps to 30). Wasn’t sure if this was related to an update. Are your symptoms similar?
I’ve been avoiding Catalina because of report after report of how buggy it is. For example, emails disappearing and can’t SSH on a custom port are still problems even with 10.15.4.
Well, I've upgraded my personal macbook to Catalina (this update) and nothing seems wrong... yet.
OTOH, my work machine (a 2016 Macbook Pro) is stuck on Mojave (due to incompatible third-party software) and the latest "Security Update 2020-002" broke video conferencing. Right in the middle of a pandemic forcing everybody to work from home!
Of course, this being Apple, I'm not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon. They don't seem to release individual updates anymore, and even these bundled "Supplemental Updates" are few and far between.
Apple really needs to get its act together regarding macOS. People need macOS to actually be productive, unless they'd rather lose this segment completely to Microsoft.
It's not "bricked" if you can fix it in Recovery Mode.
Still bad that it's happening, but the term "bricked" is thrown around so flippantly these days. If a piece of tech is bricked, it's not recoverable at all.
The original source[0] states that access to Recovery Mode is not possible, at least in some cases. One user there reports[1] that the device shows no signs of life--no power, no fans spinning, nothing:
> No power at all. I tried SMC and PRAM reset but sadly was unable to do either since my computer won’t even turn on.
Computer went to sleep after the update. This was on Friday. Haven't been able to do any kind of thing on it. Trackpad 'clicks' but no screen, not touchbar, nothing (2018 Macbook Pro).
Called apple, they tld me it had to go a store, unfortunately where I live, due to quarantine there are no shops available to pick it, and we aren't allowed to drive outside our district.
Will try the apple configurator idea someone posted below and will report back. Just need to find a cable that supports both power and data that is USB a to USB c.
If your entire startup is dependent on one single Macbook there is something severely wrong with your business model and I hope your customers and/or investors are aware of this risk before giving you any money.
Obviously depending on a laptop for runtime code would be bad, but plenty of early stage startups depend heavily on a small number of machines for customer support and continued development.
Probably a bigger issue isn’t that they’re a single laptop failure away from collapse, the bigger problem is that replacing a laptop right now would be unusually difficult.
In the world of git and cheaply available easy to use backup software, there is zero excuse to not have backups of everything to load on another machine. Even if you want to avoid the cloud and keep it local, a 128gb USB3 drive is under $50.
“A small number of machines” is not what we are talking about. We’re talking about one single consumer-grade laptop that would collapse the entire business forever.
Giving the benefit of the doubt; it’s entirely possible they have that setup, with the tacit assumption that if their machine died they could buy another same day.
Now, you really can’t buy another laptop same day.
Yeah. I gave my MBP (late 2016 “Esc”) to the Apple Store in London for repairs on 12 February. They decided to replace it (yay) and the replacement is scheduled to reach me the week after next. That’s about 10 weeks without my main machine, thanks to SARS-CoV-2. Really drives home the need for a contingency plan.
Might not be a bad idea to buy another laptop (cheap) and just boot it up once a month to make sure you can use it, and if your system dies, then just pull that one out and use it while Apple RMAs your primary. If the cheap laptop doesn't have enough power, just connect to an Amazon Workspace or something and use that until your normal laptop can work again.
Tried it all, nothing worked. Even the DFU revive/restore.
Tomorrow will call a close enough store that seems to be (stated on their website) doing pick-ups and see if they can come and pick it.
My main concern now is they will try to try and charge 1000 or so euros for a repair and I will have to eat the cost as I can't really ask for a replacement one from company or friends since everyone is stuck at home
All possible things. 30 seconds, 60 seconds. 10 seconds then plug in cable. SMC reset. DFU mode (it enters dfu mode, but restore doesn't work). I spent the last 48 hours trying to bring it back to life. Unless Apple releases some kind of software we can use on another mac to 'fix' this one, I don't feel it will be fixed without shipping it to them.
Confirmed; this is what happened to my 16" after this install. I needed to do a DFU restore (using Apple Configurator 2 -- you can download it to your hopefully spare MacBook from the app store) to get my mac back up and running. Unfortunately, for some reason, after the DFU restore, my 16" came back up to do a full reinstall, and I had to restore my files from backup.
I hope Apple doesn’t expect that everyone has a “Spare Macbook” laying around. I’ve been experiencing random system crashes when anything connects via TB3, and 3 random Kernel panics since the update.
The SSD in a T2 Mac is encrypted in the same way that an iPhone is, so if the DFU crashes hard enough you’ll have to regenerate new keys and that’s equivalent to drive zero.
No, it’s not possible to use a FileVault recovery key at this stage of repair.
It’s not failure, it’s secure by design to prevent attackers/governments from stealing your files without consent.
Under DFU brick and reset circumstances, the private key is gone, because otherwise an attacker could just upload a hacked firmware via DFU and access all your files.
I assume the installer uses a different process that performs a DFU upgrade-in-place that safely manages the handoff using signed code and such, but that’s not the process we get as a last restore described above.
If you don’t have off-device backups, you’re accepting the risk of losing all your data at any time due to any number of possible failures (software and hardware). Not much use getting upset about this specific case.
Not sure what DFU means as I'm not familiar with Mac. With any other encryption, it doesn't matter what the state of my system is. As long as I have the key, I can always decrypt it. And it's not a vulnerability. Without the key, the data is effectively inaccessible for everybody else (except maybe somebody with a quantum computer).
The T2 chip itself (runs bridgeOS which is like watchOS) do. It is used only to recover the firmware of the T2, AFAIK it can't be used to write to the SSD directly.
The checkra1n team recently showed that all Macs with a T2 chip are vulnerable to checkm8 exploit used to jailbreak iPhones, and this could persist for a while due to the T2 chip staying on between application processor reboots.
This allows override of mic disconnect (except on the newest models which switched to hardware disconnect), Secure Boot/Firmware Password, and allows you to bypass Apple's signing of Intel ME firmware, TB3 firmware, and CPU microcode. Whether or not there is still Intel signing after that is unknown, but there are already some sort of issues with the host key being leaked on that. The one useful feature I can think of is allowing SSD replacement (you still have to find a way to resolder ofc) and Touch Bar customization.
I think the most likely attack vector for this is an evil maid style attack where corrupted T2 firmware is loaded that rewrites the contents of the SSD while macOS is running to launch further exploit code on that platform.
The one thing not to worry about is if you have FileVault turned on with a password, that still can't be cracked because your password is not stored anywhere on the device. But the BitLocker-style automatic encryption with no password that just locks the SSD to that specific T2 chip isn't useful anymore.
hi, thank you for posting this. I was fascinated by the checkm8 exploit since I read about it last September. Completely unknown to me was that T2 Mac's were also vulnerable to this. With all the vulnerabilities that are now open due to this, i'm questioning was it even worth ever putting these chips inside Macbooks? In retrospect, would they have been better off just scrapping this idea completely? Because the way you put it, due to the checkm8 exploit the T2 is now practically useless in everything it was originally meant to do.
Right now, yes, but in usual circumstances you could just borrow a friend's box, your IT department could fix it, or you could have a el-cheapo Mac (either an old one or like a Mini from 2010) that can run Configurator (which doesn't require a recent version of OS X, I don't think).
Still sucks, just a bit less. not really different than an iPhone, except that you can rebuild those on Windows (for now).
"Bricked" is relative, depending on your skill level.
For some consumers, if recovery mode doesn't work that might be the end of line.
However, there are more advanced users that can access the storage via another system and fix it there, hook up via serial port or JTAG and flash new firmware, or even desolder and replace chips.
On the far other end of the spectrum, there's going to be people that consider "doesn't show the normal UI after I press the power button" as bricked.
If you go that route, "bricked" is now indistinguishable from "broke," and we already have a word for that. Broke. We would have then gone from a situation where we had two different states and names for each of those states to a situation where we have two words for the very same, very fuzzy state and no way to talk about the other state.
It makes a mockery of the idea of advice. Imagine your parents calling you and telling you that their machine is bricked. Well, I guess they must buy a new one and the old must go to electronic recycling. No need for a diagnostic of any kind, it's bricked.
Linguistic descriptivism will be the death of communication and standards. Only pushing back at the creep will allow people to discuss anything technical. Imagine the trend should it overtake medicine. If a certain kind of stroke is suspected, the patient should take aspirin right away. No, aspirin-aspirin, not ibuprofen. Then you have someone who says, "Well, ibuprofen is an aspirin sure!"
As much as I would like precise and accurate language, the reality is that people have varying degrees of knowledge of any field. That is why computer technicians and doctors alike have to ask deeper questions when making a diagnosis.
Even within a field, people may have slightly different interpretations of what a word means. Take consumer electronics. Say someone plugged in the wrong power supply and blew an inductor. If you don't know what a power supply filter is, it's garbage. If you do know what's going on, it's a simple repair. Now look at the case of a bad firmware update, where the device cannot reach recovery mode. Someone with a knowledge of embedded software development may know how to fix that, particularly if they have connections with the vendor. Most people will consider it damaged beyond repair. The thing is, you can have one person who is knowledgeable about software and another about electronics having entirely different interpretations of what bricked means. The only real commonality in the definition is, "I cannot repair it." For someone with negligible knowledge about how consumer electronics, that is going to have a very broad application.
Personally, I think that bricked means that it can only be repaired with specialized tools (including soldering irons or JTAG interfaces). But hey, I'm sure a lot of people would beg to differ.
Bricked, to me, means it is physically just fine, but it doesn’t work due to some kind of software issue.
“I bricked my phone and had to spend a whole day reading obscure guides to three different levels of embedded software before I could get it working again” feels like a perfectly valid sentence. You can fix a bricked thing, just like you can fix a broken thing, but both require some investment of time and possibly the use of tools that you won’t usually find outside the hands of specialists.
imo "Bricked" means you turned your piece of electronics into a brick, it cannot be recovered. Otherwise as mentioned before, it's just "broken", which can be recovered from in most cases.
A bricked device usually can be recovered using only software tools and sometimes a special cable. Sometimes those tools or cables are only possessed by the manufacturer, which frustrates consumers and makes it seem like the devices are unrecoverable, but they’re not.
A broken device, on the other hand, can’t be recovered using software tools or a special cable because it contains broken parts that must be repaired or replaced.
A physically broken device might still be functional though, so personally your terms are backwards.
A bricked device has a slight chance of recovery, if you have the tools/skills/training. It is a brick until that repair with high applitude is completed.
Something that is broke doesn't mean it is functional or not, just not at a perfectly working condition to worse. it might be repaired by doing a reset of a device, or something more advanced.
This is from my experience dealing with non-technical people who are mechanically inclined, but not technically inclined. they will call with a "broke" device that just needs a reset since they have too many users in a system all attempting to run the same device on different things. (Sorry keeping vague to keep me out of hot water). They will also call in with something "bricked" because the device won't function due to a damaged USB port, and they don't have the skill set/components to solder a port on something electronic. And then further down the scale it is a paperweight when it won't boot and is a piece of hardware they hate.
I disagreed with GP's use of the term bricked to mean unrecoverable. You seem to agree with me because you wrote that a bricked device can be recovered with the proper tools/skills/training. I hadn't considered partially-working devices, but I think you're right that they shouldn't be properly called bricked.
The threads here show that even highly technical people disagree on what conditions should be considered bricked versus broken. To a non-technical person whose device isn't working, however, there is no practical difference.
I actually changed my mind a little after posting that comment. I think it was mentioned elsewhere also, but even something that I would consider "bricked" could still probably be recovered by someone with access to the right tools (ability to reflash via JTAG, replacing chips etc.)
I would refine my definition to be that a "bricked" device is something that has occurred via a failed software update making the device inoperable to all but the tiniest subset of users.
So...I generally agree with the idea that it is more useful to have two terms that mean something distinct than two terms that both mean a fuzzy version of the same thing. In that, despite linguistic history, or the common parlance of whatever time or place, I think "literally" is useful as a concept that should disallow it from use as a term for exaggeration. Because sometimes context does not expose "I am literally going to kill you"'s meaning, and it is useful to know if that's literal or not.
However, I think the situation you might find here is that, if you define "bricked" as a situation which is literally unrepairable, almost nothing is ever bricked. Which similarly makes it a not very useful term. Bricking would be a term exclusive to devices which have been...exposed to an intense EMP, or run through an oven. Situations which, while they may occasionally happen, happen so rarely that no one would ever use the word.
Bricked specifically means it’s unrepairable (ie: it’s now a paperweight, a brick).
It’s fair to say “bricked” is a sub-category of “broke” but if something is software repairable then it isn’t bricked.
Also aspirin and ibuprofen are very different chemicals. I wouldn’t advise conflating the two. The resulting effect could be worse than the brick/broke problem we are discussing ;)
If a device requires extraordinary measures most people cannot or will not take in order to "unbrick" it, then it's possible for the usage to be correct even if such a procedure exists.
For example - years ago, NVIDIA got in some hot water over some of their mobile GPUs getting so toasty some of the solder points broke, leading to bricked systems. If you were the adventurous sort, you could heat the laptop enough to reflow the solder and end up with an unbricked system, but that's not an approach most people are going to take.
Anything can be recovered with enough effort, technical knowhow and the right equipment. The distinction is what can be realistically repaired. Generally the term “unbricking” only exists because people overuse the term “bricked” (eg a phone stuck in a boot cycle isn’t a “brick”, it’s just “stuck in a boot cycle”. However if you do manage to fix a device by specialist hardware repairs then yes, I think it’s fair to say you’ve “unbricked” it.
You're all just messing with that n-gate.com guy, right?
(FWIW: If the terms are to be interpreted relative to the device owner's competence level, we also need to prosecute people saying "You're dead to me" for murder)
I agree. We already live in a world where many people use the phrases "hard drive", "CPU" and "computer" interchangeably when talking about a desktop computer.
Is the power system in your house bricked if you don't know how to reset the fuse? Is your car bricked if your battery dies and you need help to replace it?
Maybe, but this sounds really strange to my ears. I think for me the difference between bricked and non bricked is the expense of the repair, and maybe if it's more than the value of the device. If the wiring in your house is all melted after lightning strike then it's bricked. If you total your car it's bricked.
It’s not just money but time, research, and ease. If you are in the desert with no cell connection and your car encounters a failure condition, even though you can pay to have it fixed, for all intents and purposes, to you it is bricked.
For a lot of people, any non-normal state == bricked. Especially now, when the genius bar isn't open.
And yes, there's a difference between a soft brick and a hard brick, and it depends on your ability to repair.
Getting my phone stuck in a bootloop is usually a soft brick, but my Pixel went into one a few years ago for no apparent reason (likely mobo failure) and that was beyond my capacity to repair or diagnose, so it's bricked.
It is the sort of nonsense we have to put up with when people start abusing a well-established term to get attention rather than to convey information -- though, in this case, it seems some machines really have been bricked.
To be sure, a soft brick is a pile of clay or mud, not a brick at all. It has neither the form or function of a brick, and therefore is the perfect analogy to this vociferous misnomer.
In my experience people call those sorts of things broken or not working, rather than (soft or hard) bricked. So people would say things like "the power went out in my house and soft bricked my TV until the power company turned it back on"? It's interesting how language evolves.
That doesn't seem to align with where you said that any non-normal state is bricked, and that the difference between soft and hard bricked is your ability to repair it.
I consider bricked to be anything you need specialized tools for. So JTAG-fiddly-stuff-required would be bricked, but if I can get the thing working by moving some jumpers or entering some advanced recovery mode while reading about it on the internet, that's not bricked. It's also bricked if you have to replace hardware, like if you have to replace a chip or a board.
I agree. From the modding days bricked always ment hardware hack was required.. I have the same gripe about how the word is used now. Glad to see it’s not just me
Dictionary definitions are not formal definitions, they are attempts to capture usage. And they are almost invariably approximations except when explicitly specifying otherwise, and outside of the the more lavish of the unabridged dictionaries are also almost in invariably simplified, both in the number of definitions of any term presented and often the individual definitions, for brevity at the expense of accuracy.
Yes, but to use a term in a technically relevant way, it needs to be tied to reality; if not, it's just marketing jargon or pseudo-tech speak. The best technical definition for this case is not by how it is most commonly understood, but how it most commonly applies. Dragonwriter makes a compelling case in that it is most commonly true that a user won't have access to the specialized hardware required to "unbrick" the device.
"Literally" is often used when the subject is metaphorical, but that's not the same thing as it meaning "metaphorically". If you took the "literally" away, it would still be understood to be metaphorical - the "literally" is intended to strengthen. It's the normal sense of literally, used hyperbolically.
In the same way, when someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say that "days" sometimes means tens of minutes.
>"Bricked" is relative, depending on your skill level.
>For some consumers, if recovery mode doesn't work that might be the end of line.
If you want to go by that rule, for a large number of people simply getting a virus would mean their computer is bricked. I think it's safe to assume "bricked" means it's a hardware level issue.
Usually it mean that device is not function anymore. Some time ago were very easy to brick phones while flashimg them. Its not hardware, it just complete mess in software.
>Usually it mean that device is not function anymore. Some time ago were very easy to brick phones while flashimg them. Its not hardware, it just complete mess in software.
Failing to make a back up of the software on a device which you're attempting to hack and subsequently destroying hardly seems relevant to an auto update locking you out. That's more like changing your password and forgetting it, or back in the day formatting your hard drive without a copy of XP to re-install. I don't know which phone you're referring to, but every phone I've rooted has been salvageable.
I guess I'd go with "bricked means the device is no longer usable, due to some problem the cause of which lies with the manufacturer", so most often devices are bricked because of hardware issues because manufacturer software issues are generally recoverable from.
Sure, but this is in the context of Macbook Pro's which can be fixed by someone with a bit of technical prowess, or literally anyone if you bring to to an Apple store. They're not locked down by hardware and unable to be restored like the Sonos smart speakers.
If I want to go to the nearest Apple store from my home, that's about 3 hours of travel time. Traveling 6 hours to fix a buggy update in the middle of social quarantine because of a pandemic it not something to look down upon.
Especially since countries other than mine have called out a complete lockdown. You can't just walk into an Apple store right now or call a techie friend over.
Chrome and Firefox, as well as Microsoft, have announced that they will only distribute stability fixes to prevent people working from home from having trouble.
In any normal year, I'd say "shit happens" (or "that's the risk of buying Apple", given that they don't even offer to do pickup of your >€2000 machine like most businesses selling laptops in that price range do). Right now, any disruption in computer performance is debilitating.
Apple needs to confirm these cases ASAP and/or pull the update for the devices affected. Apple isn't the only one releasing bricking updates by the way, Samsung has pulled an update for their A70 phone because of bricking issues two days ago.
The problem with this 'it is relative' line of logic is that everything can be relative. We need terms that describe stuff regardless of how people perceive it.
Otherwise, as you said, 'bricked' can mean almost anything. So what's the point of using a word without any particular meaning?
I've always had the impression that the difference between bricked and non-bricked is if it requires you to "fix" the hardware, it's considered bricked while if you can somehow fix it with just software, it's not bricked (yet?)
So flashing new firmware to fix the problem, not bricked.
Requiring soldering stuff and replacing hardware, it's bricked.
If the Apple store is open and not closed during a world-wide pandemic.
In this case, you can probably recover through the DFU mode and reinstalling Bridge OS. But this requires another Mac, which some people may not have, and at least some tech know-how.
The above thread about using DFU to recover a bricked MacBook confirms this: To HN experts, the device was bricked, until a new repair step was made known that could repair the issue (“unbrick it”).
>However, there are more advanced users that can access the storage via another system and fix it there, hook up via serial port or JTAG and flash new firmware, or even desolder and replace chips.
Not all people own more than one system.
If it was my only computer, and depend on it to do work and earn my living, and it broke, I would be terribly upset. Especially these days with the quarantine.
I agree. Back in the day I often installed custom ROMs on my Android phones and there was a distinction between needing to use recovery mode or losing your data vs "bricking", literally meaning that you turned your phone into a brick.
There were some "unbricking" guides but those usually required hardware voodoo, soldering, etc., things that most people couldn't do.
Now it's a clickbait term that has lost its original meaning of "you now own an expensive paper weight".
I remember the term being used at least as far back as the mid-80's. If you screwed up adding a second SID chip to your Commodore 64, the guides warned you about the potential for "bricking" the computer. Usually through static discharge.
It requires a separate, recent Mac, involves arcane combinations of specific ports, keys, and timings, relies on luck and voodoo, and ultimately may not even work.
On the one hand, I tend to agree with you. But on the other hand, I think there is a significant nuance - for many users going into recovery mode is beyond what they are comfortable doing with their laptop and so for all intents and purposes a laptop that can only be recovered that way is unrecoverable.
More generally, any issue with a computer can be fixed by a sufficiently skilled and determined user - maybe with some data loss. Even a broken firmware might be fixed by writing a new one, cracking the authentication mechanism, and building a custom rig to flash it to the chip.
It's all a matter of degrees and how much users can be expected to do which makes defining exactly what "bricked" means very difficult.
To be honest, even as an advanced user, I'm not comfortable with recovery modes on any operating system. They tend to be monolithic black boxes and that's a lot scarier than every other recovery method short of desoldering Macbook flash.
At least in the Android world, I've seen folks make the distinction between a "soft" or "hard" brick, with the former being fixable via a recovery mode or other software method, while the latter would require a hardware modification or may be truly bricked.
This is an unnecessary pedantic argument that is also wrong.
Bricking does not mean unrecoverable. That’s why the term unbricking exists.
It’s absolutely ok to call something that most regular users will be unable to fix on their own and in the meanwhile their device won’t even turn on “bricking”.
Originally, "the device is bricked" meant that the device was about as useful as a brick, i.e. it had no useful functionality left couldn't be recovered at all. However, as the parent points out, it's been increasingly misused.
FYI, Korean have literally the same expression used in the web "벽돌이 되다", not sure if it comes from the english web though.
Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices.
> Anyway, the "bricked" expression is more commonly used in smartphones and PlayStation Portable (PSP) than laptops. Then it makes more sense when considering the size of the devices.
I think it's also at least in part more commonly applied to those types of devices because they're generally more locked down than a laptop, leading users to risk bricking by trying jailbreaking them. Installing a custom OS on most laptops just isn't nearly as risky in terms of bricking potential.
What everyone else said, but also, it's a particular kind of turned-into-a-brick: you can render something useless just by running a few hundred volts through it; "bricked" means that it's still functioning in some way, but because of a configuration problem it isn't listening to external input and never will again (because it also can't hear any input that might fix the configuration).
I started using this expression in 2006 when developing apps for flip-phones. It was common for the phones to fail to reliably receive app installation files and mid-way through the process, disconnect their serial ports from my development computer.
After that the phones would be, essentially, a brick.
I did not have the technology to fix it - a JTAG connector and software to drive a reinstallation of what I assumed was the firmware.
I classed bricked as something that need hardware intervention to make work again. Bit like having a bad bios flash and the only way to fix is to make a custom JTAG cable and serial transfer...effort. With that mostly bricked is a broken boot bios in many instances, maybe some other definitions, but most blur between bricked and broken and with that I'd class it broken over bricked if it needs hardware replaced.
Eh. I'm so happy to now be alone. I really hope they'll hear it. I just sent my brand new MBP 16" back to Apple, because I believe that's what happened to me too. 2 weeks ago Friday an update fetched overnight messed me up--upon starting I got an installer with "27 minutes to go", then a login screen, and upon a login with my password, I got a pure-white-screen for 2-5s, then 2s of max-fan speed, and an instant reboot.
And it went on to happen in the loop: login -> white screen -> reboot.
Recovery mode + macOS reinstall = "Can't install macOS on this computer"
To my that starts to match the definition of "bricked" already, because a normal person really can't probably recover from this at that point.
Recovery mode (booted via USB drive) = "Installer is missing assets" (tried 2 USB drives, after re-downloading Catalina installer
Recovery mode (booted via USB drive with Mojave) = this is not supported anymore
Recovery mode -> Disk Utility -> First Aid -> run a FS check, turned out APFS volume is corrupted ("fsroot tree is invalid")...
Target mode (went to BestBuy to get a special "SS+" certified USB-C cable, because of course a normal cable doesn't work) connected to my macOS Catalina Mac mini -> couldn't unencrypted the APFS partition enough though the password was correct. Read every possible target mode tutorial, and there's no mention about what Catalina did to Recovery Keys/User (other than them simply not being there), but you need to pass a UUID of a recovery used, and I only had some iCloud Recovery Keys there. Tried my MacBook password, my iCloud password etc. Nothing worked. Basically I couldn't un-encrypt the drive.
Ended up just starting Recovery Mode again, mounting a separate USB disk from the Terminal, copied valuable stuff over.
Removed all APFS volumes, tried to re-install on a fresh volumes. Nothing worked. Was getting the same issues from the installer. Gave up. Packed this $4k computer and sent it back to Apple. Writing this from my Mac mini, with Catalina, happily rejecting any updates. BTW, Catalina installer is a joke. It is broken since Catalina came out, and it's not getting any better.
They're earning billions yet can't afford to keep 5 mac books of each type in different configurations in one room and person or computer who will launch update before release and report green light. As always whatever size of company testing is a bottleneck because having roughly 25 computers and testing room is a problem. What a wonderful world.
I am having serious problems with WiFi. I have about six apple devices and my home wlan works perfectly for all of them except my MacBook Pro. It connects and then in some minutes there is no internet. No packets in no packets out. Tried everything.
Tomorrow I do a hard reset. Nice way to spend my Easter holidays.
The quality of Apple's Apple's and software has been on a gentle downward trend since about 2015.
I still prefer them for now, but eventually the cost/benefit ratio just won't make sense anymore. If I'm paying for crappy quality, I'd rather just buy cheap.
This is what happens when you focus on features over functionality, get excited over "delighting" your customers over providing reliable products, and put visibility over stability. Steve Jobs had a nice balance of this, Tim Cook is just a numbers guy.
Ugh. My 2018 i9 has been freezing randomly recently. I actually rushed to install the most recent update hoping it would fix the freezing. It hasn’t and now I gotta worry about this. I regret upgrading to Catalina. Nothing but problems since.
I have been lucky thus far, I suppose. Before I run the updates, I disconnect all peripherals (Bluetooth devices, external monitors) and even close out all active applications.
The two events are likely unrelated but so far has not failed me.
I had to send my mac in for repair. Horrifyingly painful during Corona. And they stole my graphics card (repair removed the graphics card), and reset back to Mojave. I had to chance re-installing Catalina myself.
Was going to update today, I guess I am going to be on my current 10.15.2 for a long time. 10.15.2 is quite stable and runs smooth enough with occasional freezes happening maybe once a month.
Does it have any impact on the display? Well, roughly the lower half-inch portion of my display gets crazy randomly. Mine is a 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro. Any remarks guys?
Apple killed my 2015 macbook pro like this. Rebooted for update and never turned on again. No smc or recovery options worked. Completely bricked and also out of warranty.
Yesterday my MacBook Pro (2018, Model "MacBookPro15,1") updated itself, and I've had no problems. I'm at macOS 10.15.4 (19E287). Is this the latest version?
Why would I want to wake up in the morning to find my laptop not working?
This issue is exactly why I only occasionally install updates, and if I do I wait a while for the canaries to leave the coal mine. I've been a user of macOS, distros of Linux, and Windows for years, and in every one of them there was the inevitable update that made the OS unusable. It happens rarely but, when it does, it's a miserable experience.
Are you kidding? I've had config files overwritten, x11/wayland/whatever just break after an update, wirelesss/power drivers just...change, sometimes to the point of having to recover it from a mono-screen tty, or updates fuck up the fs or something else that requires me to hit up single user mode.
Yeah, I got a black screen on boot on more than one occasion because of some change to either X11 or its config after updating. It's probably a rite of passage for a seasoned Linux user to figure out how to undo the damage to their `/etc/x11/xorg.conf`. (then again, I stopped using linux about 4 years ago, so maybe that's changed)
The Linux 5.4 (LTS!) and 5.5 releases had consistent hangs on many Intel GPUs that use the i915 driver. I had to revert back to 4.19.x on my Linux machine.
Last time I tried to update a Linux install I was trying to go from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, LTS to LTS. It crashed during the update and corrupted the initial install, throwing me back to grub to try to undo the damage.
The first thing I always do is disable auto-updates. Auto updating does not deserve the level of trust we put it in it. Just a few months ago, Google's creepy invisible updater rendered people's Apples unbootable if they didn't have SIP enabled, which many people including myself have good reason not to[1]. Thankfully, I had already blocked Keystone Agent with an immutable folder.
This auto-updating treadmill we've been sold on is really beneficial for developers, but it causes some major problems for end-users.
I have honestly lost track of the number of times I have had an update cripple a device. My iPad got ruined, my PS3 lost Linux, iTunes removed p2p music sharing in a deceptive update, Cisco gutted residential routers and forced people onto their crummy new platform[2]... I could go on and on. And this isn't even counting Android. I had a friend lose Miracast support in an Android update, minutes before he had to give a presentation.
And those are all examples of updates functioning as intended, even though they are against the interests of the users. I can add more citations if anyone is curious.
So no, if you use your device for anything important, then don't update it until you've made a backup, and had a chance to read up on any potential problems. It really says something that in this day and age, I've had to become much more vigilant about backing up my data than ever before.
Because forcing everything to be evergreen means that they only have to support the latest version. They can also corral users away from less common and older platforms.
One thing I really don't like about it, is how it forces you to spend more money on the latest hardware you don't need. Something is broken when I can't use a three year old phone to pay a parking ticket in my city. And they can just scoff at me and say that it is my fault for daring to go two years without buying a new device.
Being evergreen means that any vulnerabilities in DRM and platform integrity are swept away under a tide of updates. As long as you are constantly pushing updates, and making it very hard for people to use an out of date version, you don't have to worry nearly as much.
Finally, in the bigger picture, it strategically makes sense because it keeps your competitors aiming at a moving target.
Why do you think it is easier to install an older operating system than it is to install an older version of Chrome? Do you really think it is solely about your security and safety? Of course not. They don't care about end user security or privacy nearly as much as they do about keeping their platform secured. In fact, it is still easy to buy out a trusted Chrome extension and attack users. There is still no possible way to disable extension updates. Google knows about this and they won't change their architecture in any major way; they just keep the updates and revocations rolling and rolling, and any users who are hurt by this are an acceptable loss.
It's two-edged. On the one hand it's easy because you only get to target one version of your software. On the other hand your developing environment can suddenly change, what worked fine yesterday requires a complete rewrite the next day.
On the one hand it's easy because you only get to target one version of your software.
I feel like Microsoft somewhat had that problem solved --- if I just want to create a basic Windows GUI app, and know that I don't need any of the newer features, I can create one binary which will work from Win95 onwards.
On the other hand your developing environment can suddenly change, what worked fine yesterday requires a complete rewrite the next day.
I've seen that happen with most of the other platforms; and relevantly to this article, Apple is a good example of constant breaking change.
1) they take ages to complete and I want to run them on my schedule instead of being forced to take a 40-60 minute chunk out of my schedule.
2) there's always a risk of an update breaking something and if that happens, I'm OK with being a few days/weeks behind.
In recent years, big OSX updates are effectively a beta release until the second service release or so. Also, they have been enormously underwhelming in the sense that I can barely tell them apart. There's generally very little in them that I need/want. I don't use any of the bundled software (mail, icloud, the office stuff, etc). All I care about is being able to run my browser (Firefox), Homebrew, some games (quite a few less as of Catalina), and development tools like vs code, intellij, docker.
I actually updated my imac to the latest Catalina last weekend, and applied the fix we're discussing here a few days ago to be able to run the latest x-plane beta with a new rendering engine that uses metal (and vulkan elsewhere); it complained it needed the latest driver. Didn't break anything for me luckily. My mac book pro is not getting the supplemental upgrade until I know it's not going to ruin my day.
I was hit by this bug, my entire unit was fucked and I had to use Recovery over the Internet to reinstall a fresh OS on my 2019 MacBook Pro. Nearly everything on my Mac was dot sourced, on Git or using my local NAS' TimeMachine share. All the same, all my data on the Mac was still lost and had to be restored using backup.
At least in the default install, it is all one partition. Moreover, if you had disk encryption or something, getting the recovery keys would be a risk even you had followed all the right steps. Granted, none of these are good excuses for not doing TM backups since those are so easy. But just saying people could lose data and not have an easy way to recover it.
Well, I lost all my data. I have an empty relocated items dir on my desktop.
Edit: there's a Configuration dir in Recovered Items which has two other dirs, a private dir which contains another etc dir which contains a shells default file. Nothing else.
I'm consistently amazed by HN's ability to take the most meaningless, inconsequential part of an article (the scroll behavior, the whitespace, the usage of the word "bricked"), and nitpick it to hell and back instead of actually discussing the article.
Yes. People on reddit are too boring serious and straight to the point. Here on HN we can have a link about some programming language and we start discussing about physics, the Universe or cats. Much more creative. :)
People on reddit are serious ? Which subs are you following ? All I see everywhere there is one word comments such as @nice, @oof,..etc and witty remarks. The discussion quality on HN is far better. Granted we do nitpick here though..
Sure the discussion quality is far better, if you're comparing to reddit in general. Discussion is often on par if you're on a niche subreddit focused on something technical.
From a personal perspective, the discussion quality on HN (on average) has declined over the past couple years. In the past the majority of comments were more substantial; it was more common to see paragraphs of well thought-out comments that delved into nitty gritty details when addressing a point.
But in the past couple years there's been a gradual increase in single-sentence comments that contribute nothing to discussion but only end up taking up screen space. Like the random person who wants to throw in their 2 cents, but have zero cents to offer.
Typical HN response, there is no multi-million dollar exchange going on here. How about filling in some of the blanks or correct the wrong parts yourself? This is such an unnecessary defensive response.
People go into Karen mode here, yes they bought expensive piece of hardware with expensive operating system.
Though site is rather technically minded they still underestimate how complex are those things.
It just another "Dropbox? Who needs that I can do the same in an hour", but somehow they don't realize when you have a budget, timelines and as always not enough developers who understand this specific thing - it is different than sitting on your own and making perfect thing. (which then if scrutinized by some other dev would be labeled as crap :D)
Especially when it's a developing story and probably published in a rush (in less than ideal situations). Mistakes happen and the informative side is more important at these times.
"Whenever the band found brown M&M's candies backstage, they immediately did a complete line check, inspecting every aspect of the sound, lighting and stage setup to make sure it was perfect. David Lee Roth would also trash the band’s dressing room to prove a point -- reinforcing his reputation in the process."
So, in summary: the team of roadies DIDN'T always do a a complete line check. And DLR would just make life hard for the hotel staff. That's just dumb all around.
I feel so conflicted after reading that article. On one end, it does a good job explaining a neat trick some smart people have used. On the other hand, it abuses it as "a proof" for some trivial and only vaguely related advice.
It's also used as a tactic to derange a discussion and get offtopic top comments to bore away or otherwise trap casual, click-happy readers. Not saying it is in this particular case.
> to get more attention than its content justifies
That your Mac can get to the point by an Apple OS update that you need to enter recovery mode? (Even as someone who is exclusively Apple, I have seen the mockery Microsoft has endured for similar).
Or worse, to the point that unless you have access to a spare Mac or the _currently closed_ Apple stores, you are shit out of luck?
"Eh, no big deal, not worth reading or commenting on".
I'd go with the fact that Apple has always been a little finicky, but initially quite fixable; then it became more and more locked down and users had to accept that fact: some left, some stayed. Nowadays pretty much nobody around here is surprised by the shenanigans you may have to go through on Apple platforms outside of the core mainstream experience.
The fact that an OS update can brick a device is a non-event, it's happened before and will happen again. Apple is not perfect, no one is. They do a pretty good job most of the time, comparatively¹.
The fact that in the case of Apple you have to suffer the aforementioned shenanigans to maybe solve the problem is, well, coincidental. It's not an event in itself either.
Note this is why production machines in professional environments usually wait a few weeks-months to update. Also why security updates are generally offered on their own (shouldn't wait to install those).
____
1: Note that, I personally can't stand being at the mercy of 1 corporation so I took matters in my own hands and run Linux: it rarely fails. When it does, it's usually my fault, so I can assign blame, learn my lesson and move on. Otherwise, I'd have to accept that every so often, a proprietary vendor update may brick the device.
Oh c'mon, the real issue here is Apple's abysmal quality control (and really it's an industry-wide trend). They're phoning it in with real, tangible effect, but based on the upvotes here at the time of writing, HN seems to consider the debate around what "bricked" implies to be the most important conversation.
> I'm consistently amazed by HN's ability to take the most meaningless, inconsequential part of an article (the scroll behavior, the whitespace, the usage of the word "bricked"), and nitpick it to hell and back instead of actually discussing the article.
> Bravo.
'Bravi', or 'brave'(f) would be the plural of that.
In English and French, Bravo generically means “congratulations”, “that was great” etc. It’s never pluralised, in the same way foreign words are not pluralised in Italian (from “computer” to “pièce de resistance”...).
Nope. First time I ever encountered “bravi” was right above this. The first time I encountered “tutti” was your comment. I am from the US. It is a safe bet that as such I only speak one language and do so poorly.
Look, if the update might "brick" my MBP, meaning break it irreparably, then I have a reason to care about this, and since it can't, I don't. It's a semantic difference but an important one.
I'd love to complain about all the meaningless parts of the article, but this website seems to detect my basic safety browser addons (uBlock Origin, uMatrix and Privacy Badger) and refuses to show me the content, giving me a lecture instead.
Most content is also available on non-spammy, ethical websites, and we shouldn't support bad actors.
Well, this is not nitpicking. The word "bricked" has a meaning, and this is not what the article describes. From the title, I thought that this update was actually bricking the computer. Thanks to the commenters for pointing it wasn't the case.
It's not like "everyone bashes apple" is a more interesting conversation.
Short articles don't have much to discuss. There's no need to get mad that someone isn't laser-focused on the two sentences you think are most important.
We'll see about (1) but (2) is unfortunately a structural problem that goes far beyond just Apple.
Developers are forced to operate in a "market" dominated by a few oligopolists that are obsessed with control, both on their own behalf and on the behalf of governments.
Something needs to be done about the default comment ordering or subthread collapsing ability on HN. I understand I can easily collapse a comment’s replies with a single tap in the correct tiny location, but that isn’t enough. I became increasingly fatigued as I scrolled down seeing reply after reply to the top comment all arguing over the definition of “bricked”, assuming that surely at any moment I’d reach the bottom of the subthread and be able to move on to read something more useful. Finally I became frustrated enough to scroll to the top and collapse the parent comment, and that worked this time, but the issue is that it isn’t always the top comment on the page you want to collapse, so it becomes a blind hunt for the correct comment to collapse. You probably won’t remember the exact indentation depth of the comment you need to collapse so you’re stuck deciding whether to waste time looking for it or tough out trying to scroll to the bottom of the subthread (while continuously getting excited then disappointed every time the indentation shifts left and you’re tricked into thinking you’ve finally reached the end). It’s a daily annoyance but I’m not sure what could remedy it.
Also I’ve read that submissions with too much early comment activity get removed automatically for seemingly being too controversial. If so then maybe that rule should apply to comments as well. Controversial comments could automatically sink lower despite upvote count, as well as older comments.
You've described the best part of HN for me because I can always count on learning something super obscure but alos super interesting that nobody else would have thought of.
I'm consistently amazed by HN's ability to take the most meaningless, inconsequential part of an article (the scroll behavior, the whitespace, the usage of the word "bricked"), and nitpick it to hell and back instead of actually discussing the article.
I thought they were bricked from the factory because of the shit keyboard that only works in clean room conditions.
And I’m not talking hearsay here, I own one and the keyboard is as shitty as the entire internet says. Comparing to my previous MacBooks that had no keyboard problems when used outdoors too.
