OS X 10.11 El Capitan: Review
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I have to chuckle when I see some reviews saying "UPDATE _RIGHT NOW_! THIS IS THE BEST OS EVER!". They said the same last year, what a coincidence. Personally, I feel that Yosemite 10.10.5 is very stable now, and I'll wait at least until 10.11.2 to upgrade, no matter how many times people tell me how wonderful El Capitan is.
El capitan seems promising though.
It is a world of difference, to the point that I am happily using my Mac Mini for stuff again, whereas before I would avoid it as much as possible and instead reach for my MacBook Pro Retina to get anything done.
It's not unreasonable to think the reviewers just didn't experience those issues.
edit: wiredfool pointed this out above, as I was writing this. Having purchased 2 equally specked computers at the same time and experiencing differing results. After upgrading from MAvericks, I personally experienced significantly better battery life. I have edited launch daemons and blocked some outgoing connections which caused coreaudiod to go into an infinite loop using >80% of the cpu. This KILLED my battery and performance. After fixing this issue, both of those metrics were amazing.
https://medium.com/@mariociabarra/wifried-ios-8-wifi-perform...
I have gamecenter.app deleted, airdrop and bluetooth disabled and many of the sharing and push notification services are disabled. I have fairly decent connectivity and not much seems to change after disabling awdl0, a speedtest seems pretty similar.
I am now really interested. Is there a way I can run a better speedtest, and also check if these issues you describe are happening because it sounds as if it is sporadic. Also, is there a way to use something other than bonjour/mdnsresponder via wi-fi? I could not find anything which is why I still use it unfortunately.
edit: Also, almost forgot.
> This was a bug for which we know the root cause and for which a patch was actually developed.
What? I have seen issues surrounding coreaudiod but none of them are referenced in your post. The post actually explained the iOS connectivity issues I am having but doesn't seem related to a glitch in the core services daemon, which seems to affect some users, and was almost certainly self-inflicted. Now, I want to test my connectivity to confirm, but it seems alright most of the time.
It seems obvious to me that a technical review will be pretty limited in term of "stability" evaluation. They will run a few tests, but it can't cover all the configurations. Especially things like the wifi issue which were mostly triggered depending on the network environment (what is your access point? What other devices are connected? etc.)
My battery life way better than hers. I'd suspect hardware, but the battery capacities check out ok. Hers just sucks the juice way faster than mine.
I'm not saying Yosemite is perfect; I'm sure there were problems with it at the start. To me, the original person I responded to seemed to kind of just make a blanket statement and I wanted to make sure it was known that there are counter-examples (based on anecdotal evidence anyway).
The biggest difference is the os.
I will concede that usage varies, hers hits Facebook, mine Twitter. And I run virtualbox but she doesn't. We're both running safari, chrome and mail.
I wonder if these problems were already apparent during the test phase.
sudo ifconfig awdl0 down
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser DisableAirDrop -boolean YES
I can say that I definitely experienced and experiencing laggy animations compared to mavericks. Launchpad animation is like 3-5 FPS and is very noticeable. But probably many people just don't care about that.
Because WiFi, right now SUCKS. The software and hardware together, the compatibility, all those optional features, Wave 1, Wave 2 etc.....
I think you are lying to yourself!
Now, there was a trend with OSX releases that, until about Lion or so, every new release was faster and more optimized than the previous one. We are used to expect just the opposite, specially from competing operating systems.
I have not seen signs of that trend in the more recent releases.
Windows is getting faster on the same hardware since Vista (7 was faster than Vista, 8 was faster than 7 and 10 is faster than 8). Linux is difficult to judge here because of the variety of DEs, but it's not really slowing down with time either.
Newer iOS versions are slower on old hardware than older versions, and this is also more or less true for Windows Phone and Android.
Then, I cannot connect to either iphone or my wife iphone's hotspot without turning the wifi off first and then turning it on again. I have the same issue on both a macbook pro and a macbook (but didn't have that issue before Yosemite).
And in term of performance, my macbook pro is nowhere as performant even with the latest Yosemite update as it was before. I also have noticed a strange issue. On yosemite, whenever the battery reaches 5%, everything slows to a crawl...
I feel that the last really stable OS from Apple was Snow Leopard
Edit: I've tried creating a new network location, resetting PRAM, resetting SMC, deleting Bluetooth PAN, re-installing the OS. Nothing seems to work reliably, and I don't know what else to try at this point.
I own a number of different machines running the same software and one of these machines just has flaky wifi. Random disconnects or stalls during large downloads. No software update is going to fix that machine.
If you had done an inquiry into the matter, linked to a stack exchange discussion on this bug persisting or being fixed that would've been a lot more useful. Maybe some technological quirks would surface that we could learn from. It's such a shame submissions like these, which the author clearly has spent a lot of time on, will get derided with snark like yours.
Now jkimmel continued in this vain; your comment has anchored the discussion in what i feel is a negative way.
I am all for starting a stack exchange discussion when working on things that built communally and not locked down. However, when you are paying Apple for a product, it is frustrating to deal with things being broken and on top of that you have to circumvent their restrictions.
If you Google "macbook wake up wifi does not work" there are plenty of complaints, a couple of half-hearted solutions, but not much else. I didn't link to any of them because it isn't worth anyone's time to have to read them.
Yes, I am technically minded. As such, I could debug this further and further, but:
1) I can only go so far. This problem requires Apple to issue a fix, and they're definitely aware of it.
2) it's a little like asking a car mechanic to do some car repairs in his spare time for fun. My Macbook is a tool, I want it to just work.
I just don't want HN to be a place of one-liners. In your original post you were complaining without adding any substance. Sorry if I sound harsh, it just really irks me. Maybe I should've left it at a down-vote, this back-and-forth is not particularly fruitful either.
I guess we can agree to disagree - I don't really know what useful substance I could provide. Plenty of people experience the same thing, and I don't think posts should be wordy just for the sake of not being one-liners.
networksetup -setairportpower en0 off
networksetup -setairportpower en0 on
wifi () {
local opt=$1
case "$opt" in
(on) networksetup -setairportpower en0 on ;;
(off) networksetup -setairportpower en0 off ;;
(toggle) networksetup -setairportpower en0 off
networksetup -setairportpower en0 on ;;
(scan) /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport en0 scan ;;
("" | -h | --help) echo "Usage: wifi <option>"
echo "option:"
echo "\ton\tSet Airport adapter on"
echo "\toff\tSetAirport adapter off"
echo "\ttoggle\tTurns wifi off and then on again"
echo "\tscan\tList available wifi networks"
return 0 ;;
esac
}
I used to have the two on the same SSID, but I found my adapters (or the OS) would gain an 'affinity' for 2.4 as the stronger signal and never use 5.
I never have any problems with performance, nor do I have issues with wifi.
I'm a full stack dev, so always running with a vm, sublime, irc app, chrome and terminal.
Everything just works fine for me.
Will be upgrading tomorrow. Like I did for Yosemite and Mavericks.
... but probably significant security issues, given that you've missed 10.10.2 + 4 security combo updates.
And 10.10.3 + 1 security combo update.
And 10.10.4.
And 10.10.5.
(which isn't to be snarky, but more 'odd' that a confessed Day 1 Updater then doesn't touch system updates until the next major release).
Stuff like Screen split between two apps are non-intuitive.
There is lots of good stuff, but Apple created also new problems or failed to fix really annoying old problems (like Wifi connectivity issues, the buggy and unreliable Finder, the annoying slowness of iTunes with larger music libraries, ...).
I have the same issue with my two USB amplifiers! I couldn't find anything about it online though.
If your application is not a game, or it does not fit the model of "here be a document, type on it", chances are the sandbox won't allow it. Actually, even if you do follow that model: see BBEdit and Coda.
What about Postbox? iStatsMenu? Heck, even Alfred. Or Parallels, Microsoft Office, the Adobe suite? These cannot be sandboxed.
Frankly, I could come up with more applications if I did some research, but why bother. Nearly everything that's interesting that's not a game will be crippled or just unavailable. And, for games, Steam is better in every way.
EDIT: By "cannot be sandboxed", I mean that they cannot be sandboxed under Apple's current draconian sandboxing rules.
You can view these exceptions by dumping the Container.plist inside a sandboxed app's container, e.g. for Calendar:
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "print SandboxProfileDataValidationInfo" $HOME/Library/Containers/com.apple.iCal/Container.plist
(Also note that some Apple apps don't have containers, like iTunes.)
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/09/os-x-10-11-el-capitan-t...
For the middleware companies, it isn't a problem to write multiple backends, as it is the reason why they exist in first place.
Also OpenGL never had much use in the consoles, for example.
However, it just goes to show that company X will do Y, because they sit in some Y organization isn't given.
I suppose I should be happy that Apple does not anywhere near the same market share that Windows did when Microsoft came up with that.
The old Apple was even more proprietary than Microsoft was.
All hardware and software were Apple specific.
It was nice and responsive even over a slow connection over the weekend while having to RDP to a remote server.
The review sorta skimmed on Metal but reported that it only worked on a Mac Pro 2013, which lead me to wonder why my 2008 Mac Pro couldn't run it with a GeForce 680 GTX, turns out it can. http://netkas.org/?p=1405
Of course you still do a backup before in case the universe blows up.
The one annoyance I've encountered is that the installer will move everything in /usr/local out of the way before doing the upgrade and moving it back. If you have a large Homebrew install, it will be much faster to move the directory first and restore it later rather than waiting for the file-by-file copy to complete, even on when using SSDs.
There was the odd infuriating bug (I'm not convinced it's tested as thoroughly as Windows is...), but overall it was fairly trouble free and the smooth upgrade process played a part in my decision to buy another. It certainly wasn't the price, at any rate.
This can be a significant point. I thought my computer was bricked when I did one of the previous upgrades (maybe Mavericks?) and the upgrade took something like 14 hours (with no change in the progress bar).
Upgrading XCode, updating homebrew, and chown-ing /usr/local seemed to fix everything.
brew doctor
Always a clean install. Always.
Whether it's NT4 or Win95 or Classic Mac or Snow Leopard or Mavericks ... always, always do a wipe and a clean install.
Life is too short to deal with the alternative.
It's potentially contradictory: the alternative is upgrading your OS and find pretty much everything where you left it, instead of having to reinstall everything. I.e. life is too short to spend time reinstalling everything.
Surely, it's an opportunity to do some cleanup of unused stuff, but otherwise, I haven't had a lot of problems upgrading OS X. (nothing memorable at least)
I've had 2 or 3 issues where old config was the root cause, but those are few and far between. I might be an outlier, but it's always just "worked for me".
Edit: oops!
Of course, you meant OS 10.2 (a.k.a. Jaguar). Otherwise, it's not that impressive ;-)
In Yosemite, it's OK except for drafts. And that's of course a big 'except' …
Containerization is unlikely to ever get a big push from Apple -- whatever half-hearted designs they had on the server space are long-since abandoned, and it's clear they favor far less heavyweight security measures for end-user apps.
"Rendering Contexts across process boundaries" doesn't even sound like it has a good use-case for any direction Apple's been working on.
Well web sandboxing for one, and running opengl through your terminal for another.
Containerization seems like a no-brainer to me since a) sandboxing naturally follows, b) it's a developer's heaven in terms of deployment, development, and testing, c) mac os x is now the only major OS in existence without any containerization capabilities controlable by anyone but apple.
And these aren't just pet issues, no developer I know (except perhaps iOS developers, for obvious reasons) welcome them. Even the non-technical users I know see them as "pretty" PITAes.
And it's not that I don't get why they do it, I just wonder about how they view the *nix-ey developers who use the platform. I'm sure there must be plenty at the company itself.
Sharing OpenGL contexts is about the opposite of sandboxing. It's unsafe.
And you can run OpenGL apps from your terminal just fine?
> Containerization seems like a no-brainer to me since a) sandboxing naturally follows,
But it's a sandboxing that isn't useful on a Desktop machine. A mail app which sees a completely different container filesystem than my word processor does not improve my life.
> b) it's a developer's heaven in terms of deployment, development, and testing
Except it's not, because OS X on servers is dead and gone, so what I'd really need is a container that works on my server, aka a Linux server aka I need a VM locally because it's not like OS X is ever going to be LXC compatible.
A container I can only use on my dev box isn't worth beans.
> c) mac os x is now the only major OS in existence without any containerization capabilities controlable by anyone but apple.
I get that Docker has grabbed a lot of hype by reinventing jails to be venture capital compatible, but honestly, for OS X it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
<https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/MultiGPUI...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9293409/can-caremotelayer...
If I'm lucky everything will still work, and it will merely scramble the interface and hide a bunch of stuff.
Unfortunately, my expectation is that on top of the interface scrambling, a bunch of stuff that's worked fine for ages will be broken in some stupid way I can't even imagine how it could happen, like it will start duplicating playlists on my phone again. Oh, and I'm guessing it will try to shove at least one unwanted, half-assed Apple service down my throat, integrate it with everything, and force me to search online for 20 minutes looking for how to turn it off, only to find out there's either no way to opt out, or the option is hidden in some obscure, unexpected location in System Preferences, or via some command line BS.
Every new release from Apple I get one step closer to switching back to Linux. Love their hardware, but their software people need to get their shit together. </rant>
I essentially use only one app on my iPhone. It's a mobile banking app. On a regular basis, my mobile banking app stops working and requires me to upgrade. Sooner or later, to upgrade the banking app, I have to upgrade my iOS, which eventually forces me to upgrade iTunes, which eventually forces me to upgrade OS X.
Western civilization has been in decline ever since Snow Leopard was deprecated. I hung to that as long as I possibly could, but even I eventually had to upgrade to Mavericks. Mavericks is tolerable, but the writing on the wall is clear: to use Apple products, you will eventually have to surrender to the software update.
To address your point, not updating really isn't an option. Sooner or later some software I use will make use of a library or framework from a new version of the OS, and then I'll be stuck either not updating it, or not being able to get my work done.
And if nothing else, next time I buy hardware I'll be getting the current version of iOs or OSX whether I like it or not.
And for the guy saying, "Don't sync your phone with iTunes," is that even a real suggestion? What happened to Apple products "just working"?
Really, it shouldn't be too much to ask that the richest company in the world do a little QA on their software so it's not buggy as hell, and not force "features" like Apple Music on everybody for the sole purpose of squeezing more money out of them.