If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint
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Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application.
Spend 5 minutes with the app and you'll find a half dozen bugs and amateurish mistakes. It's baffling, and it's been a problem for two years now.
Bear in mind the old version did need to be updated (new CoreStorage features, has to handle Fusion drives, now APFS).
I get the sense there's a lot of shuffling between teams in Apple, and teams are a lot smaller than you'd expect, and this is the inevitable result. The advantage (I'm guessing) is that they get to move quickly, and it reduces bureaucracy/politics, but ... yeah, this isn't great.
At least diskutil is still there, and is as powerful as ever.
Joel Spolsky's point: They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
Statements like that, while powerful are dangerous as they turn into baseball bats for people to hit each other with.
And they become an excuse for ignoring things and becoming an absolutist religious zealot.
There are legitimate cases where rewriting the code from scratch can be the single BEST strategic decision.
(And of course, vice versa)
If I have strong rational reasons to believe that a rewrite is warranted quoting Joel Spolsky or anyone else is not going to change my mind.
I love that analogy.
I see it again and again with so many of the "classics" - phrases like "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and "adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later". Sure, these statements are right more often than not, but the zealousness with which they are often applied leads to an enormous amount of mistakes.
There ARE cases in which optimizations aren't premature. System architecture is all about designing a system for optimal performance in some area or another. And in some cases, bringing in more people to a late project can speed things up.
I will quote you a lot from this time on. It is such a true and widely applicable judgement.
The problem really is that the new Disk Utility is a minimal viable product, rather than an app that can actually do everything the diskutil command line utility can do.
And then you have terrible bugs like this, which is presumably a non-security engineer writing a bit of UI code that they shouldn't be. I doubt this bug actually came from the APFS encryption itself.
(this is 75% speculation on my part and 25% confirmed by conversations with 2 ex-apple engineers.)
Consider: Terminal.app comes with macOS, not with Xcode. If the BSD environment was just there for developers, would this be true?
Today's Microsoft seems to increasingly think sysadmins would rather use PowerShell than MMC snap-ins; I'm inclined to think that today's Apple is similar. And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades.
I would bet Apple just thinks the CLI is the optimal Human-Computer Interface for doing some things.
Is this not true any more? Where does ex-Apple dev talent tend to go? (Microsoft? Indie app development?)
I know lots of people who have spent their entire careers there because the work is challenging and interesting. I also know teams that handle anonymous backend infrastructure e.g. AppleID or ADC where there was higher turnover.
No different to any other company.
Anecdotally, Chris Lattner is a high-profile recent departure. :-)
You know the sort of thing that happens to developers: Every. Single. Day.
These are in the first page of tests I’d write. NIST SP 800-111 asks for forensic pre-release testing—can you really believe such happened here?
This isn’t a failure of the engineer who wrote out the wrong buffer. Everyone makes mistakes like that. It’s a failure of the Engineering culture and engineering management that shipped without reasonable testing, or manual pre-release examination. It’s a failure of the culture that accepted bugs like this, rather than asking (appropriately, for an Apple FDE product): let’s assume that it will cost someone $1B or a thousand lives if this fails. What should we do to assure its correctness?
Force quit, reopen, loads fine.
Go to the Today tab. Scroll through. Notice that sometimes your scroll doesn't get registered. Why? Because if you try to scroll over an "Open" or "Get" button, it steals the event and breaks your scrolling. Amature mistake, and the kind of detail Apple used to always get right.
Watch OS SDK: When the user performs an action on a notification that arrives on the watch, it calls a callback on the application on the phone. What happens if the user's phone is not reachable? The action just gets dropped on the floor, and to the user the app looks buggy. (Maybe/hopefully this is fixed in the latest version of watchOS; I haven't checked.) Flawed, poorly thought out API design.
Go to the updates tab on the App Store app. Pull down to refresh. No updates, but the "Available" headline disappears and then weirdly reveal-animates back into place, an overall feeling of flicker.
Huge issues? No, but a very real drop-off in quality and polish from what Apple used to put out.
(The password bug is a little different -- obviously bugs can and do happen. But not having a testing procedure in place for the core paths through a piece of software is a huge process failure, especially for something critical like security. Every release of the software should have testers going through a plan like, "enter password hint. attempt to access volume. verify password hint is correctly shown." &c.)
(Also, to be fair, I think after taking a huge dive the quality of Apple software seems to be slowly ticking up again.)
There is a significant difference between a bug and a severe security error regarding basics.
The thing to understand, is that everyone inside Apple uses diskutil(8), not Disk Utility.app. diskutil(8) is the "canonical" way to do almost everything related to Disk management on macOS, the same way diskmgmt.msc is on Windows. Everything else is a secondary "convenience" view to just allow certain workflows (like installing macOS without overwriting things, or unlocking a FileVault volume with a master password to install macOS on it) to be accomplished more easily—like the Properties view of a disk drive in Windows.
If there are other "convenience views" of disk management that you think would be helpful, why not make them into an app and sell it? One my favourite macOS programs, DaisyDisk, is basically just such a convenience view. People are willing to buy these—especially as a gift for their "prosumer" friends. Apple can't predict every use-case that a prosumer might want an accelerator for, but the free market probably can.
You explain it perfectly yourself:
> Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac when it's time to upgrade.
As long as you still prefer Macs over anything else, Apple has no incentive whatsoever to be any better. They merely have to be just good enough for you not to switch and keep using macOS/iOS/etc.
Strong disagree. One of the first troubleshooting steps for 'My Mac is slow/unstable/pinwheeling etc is - Run Disk Utility and check/repair your disk.
The iOS-using products are Apple's cash cow. It does make sense that they'd prioritize working on iOS. However, what doesn't make sense is that Apple certainly has enough resources to work on both OSes. It's not like they don't have enough money to hire good developers.
That is the complaint, however. It makes some sense, except that Apple could easily afford to invest in both macOS and iOS.
It seems that macOS has gotten completely bogged down (like really, really bogged down) and mired in bureaucracy.
What I just described is a "little thing" that's very very hard to quantify to non-engineers, sadly.
(I recently learned (I have no exposure to Apple, I'd like to but their stuff is expensive!!) that you can't just "go ahead and upgrade Xcode", but that you have to do it in a very specific/esoteric way or you break absolutely everything, and that it's not unreasonable sometimes to just nuke macOS from orbit and green-field reinstall everything.)
Some of them are sloppy glitches in functionality or display, others have to do with poor stability (force closing more often). Never encountered any of these issues on iOS a few years ago.
It looked like an eager bright eyed bushy tailed summer intern did it in their spare time to impress their manager who had never heard of this Internet thing before, but who then couldn't get the rest of the company to buy into this weird TCP/IP thing, because it was distracting customers from using LocalTalk like they were meant to. But then they shipped it anyway, but never updated it after the intern left at the end of summer.
http://www.simonstl.com/projects/tcpip/mac/mactcp.html
I get the same vibe from the current Terminal Preferences Profiles dialog, whose window you aren't allowed to resize, and which has the fixed size scrolling list of configurations, fixed width run command input field that doesn't let you see the whole command and makes it hard to edit, and many other cramped fields, whose labels are all clipped and scrolled, even when you click on them to edit the labels.
Why the FUCK does anyone (ESPECIALLY Apple) use tiny fixed sized windows jam packed full of cramped tabbed and sub-tabbed dialogs with nested vertically scrolling lists of horizontally scrolling text fields, in these days of gigantic screens?
Lights are on but nobody's home!
Especially with the move toward forced open-plan workspaces in the new campus, I suspect Apple is going to have serious problems attracting and retaining key talent in the years ahead. They are reaching the point where stock options will no longer be a strong incentive due to lack of upside potential.
On the contrary, I booted the exact same machine into internet recovery (which gave me the Mavericks-era Disk Utility.app) and it literally had a huge warning that the fusion drive was partitioned incorrectly, and a repair button.
Why remove important features that still (have to) exist in the underlying utility? Like this is literally an operating system designed to run on only a handful of hardware, which is why people like it.
The pain it inflicts upon me... Ever since that thing appeared it's been horrible. It errors if you look at it wrong, and who knows what it's really doing?
Only in iOS 11 have they added tags to the files app - the previous iCloud Drive app had a button for tags but it was seemingly not implemented.
Finding issues in apple products is really like going hunting in a zoo at the moment.
On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep. The App Store is some horribly wrapped, unresponsive web app. Disk Utility is useless. Etc, etc. It's a horrible mess of an experience.
The Dell running Linux is far more stable. I can get literal months of uptime out of the Dell using it on a daily basis w/ 100% hardware functionality. No stereotypical Linux desktop pains. And this is coming from someone who was an Apple fanboy for 10+ years. Apple's QA just went to shit and I was sick of dealing with their bugs.
Edit: For those telling me it's a hardware problem: it's possible, but I've had similar experiences w/ the wake-from-sleep issues on two different copies of the 2016 15" MBP, and the Time Machine corruption on a MBP and an Air. So if it is a hardware problem, then their hardware QC is as bad as their software.
2015 Dell Precision M6800 issues (all non-linux-related have been replicated by >=1 coworker):
Spurious thermal throttle activation occasionally reduces performance to molassas
Bluescreen in network drivers ~ once a week
Unless you disable integrated/discrete graphics switching, it fails to recognize external displays
HDD makes strange grinding noise every month or so, but hasn't failed yet.
Shit control loop on fans sometimes causes them to repeatedly pulse on and off
Shit battery / power management (about ~1.5hr tops after incentivized settings optimization)
Shit trackpad
Takes ~1 minute to recognize new USB HID devices (might be AV's fault)
(Linux-only): latest stable ubuntu toggles backlight on/off at 30hz
(Linux-only): ancient supported ubuntu doesn't support modern chrome or firefox (!)
(Linux-only): able to wake from sleep exactly once
(Linux-only): massive pain in the ass to install drivers on supported ubuntu (directions for the packager app were out of date and incorrect to a degree that was difficult to work around)
Dead key, replaced keyboard (cost: $10 + two hours)
Spill caused unreliable trackpad, replaced. (cost: $30 + two hours)Macs have high enough volume per model that parts and tutorial videos are plentiful and cheap :D
The land of PC hardware and Linux support is highly model/version dependent.
OTOH, as long as your hardware is decently supported, I haven't really had fundamental complaints about desktop Linux in the 10+ years I've used it full time. It sounds like for certain laptops there has been good support for a couple years.
Typically, I'll get about 30-100 days of uptime on my mac laptops (usually a software update or installing a kernel extension). On my Linux desktop or server it'll be closer 100-300 days (again, usually kernel patches). Working with OpenGL heavy software, once or more a year there will be a bad combination of Nvidia drivers and kernel that could cause your desktop to crash during certain operations.
I did encounter corrupted Time Machine backups when I set up my own network Time Machine Server in Linux (using netatalk). When my laptop would go to sleep in the middle of a backup over wifi the whole backup would get corrupted. I haven't had that problem since I switched to using Synology as a network Time Machine server (I never had it happen when using a USB Time Machine backup, either). I've never used a Time Capsule.
Well, they can just open it up and cha-... I hope it's an older model.
No defense to Apples SW problems, but it sounds like you may have a hardware problem. You should take your computer into Apple and see if you can get it fixed or replaced.
At a certain point, you want things to just work out of the box. You want to outsource the mental effort and time required to "just search and fix".
:eyeroll:
Must be working with very small datasets given so little RAM.
The next laptop will not be a Mac though. Both the hardware and especially the software has gotten progressively worse to to point where it's not worth it anymore.
If I had my way, time would've froze with 10.6.8.
I would be suspicious of any drive that has even one bad block.
But, hey, here's APFS!
The solution was to get another computer.
After the debacle that was the Sierra upgrade (we had all of our users get locked out of their machines after the upgrade reboot and countless issues with Wifi), I'm hesitant to think about High Sierra or iOS 11.
Apple's reputation for high prices was always offset by high quality. If they keep skimping on the quality side, I'd imagine their leverage on the pricing side is going to get hurt (eventually).
When I see that a major software release is published for general use I used to assume that it was solid and that the general public was not being used as guinea pigs.
Really that was 5+ years ago. Apple is a life style company first these days and a technology company second you can see this by their priorities.
Event with all of their employees, they can't truly make a unique premium product every year.
'If a hint was set in Disk Utility when creating an APFS encrypted volume, the password was stored as the hint. This was addressed by clearing hint storage if the hint was the password, and by improving the logic for storing hints.'
Yikes, hope no one was relying on that.
> When creating an encrypted APFS volume in Terminal with the diskutil command line utility, the actual hint is shown, rather than the password.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/05/macos-high-sierra-disk-...
BTW Apple, your latest iphone update has completely trashed your stock widget's display... please revert it back the way it was, thanks - a user.
This was probably introduced in the GM seed.
Mistakes happen, inevitably – a good system will catch them early enough.
An action item to fix something can never be "don't make that mistake again." You have to make a change to the system to find and prevent the error, not a change to the people in the system.
I hope I'm wrong, and that a bug like this happened purely due to dumb luck. But somehow, I'm doubtful.
OTOH, I'm having a hard time imagining what that "believable" scenario might look like. You hand me Disk Utility to test, and I'm going to do some exploratory testing to cram some large strings in both fields, yada yada, we all know the drill. You know, take a moment or two before hitting the code editor. I'm just grasping to figure out how I wouldn't find this bug in like five minutes. And that's before formal tests start getting written. There's missing a bug, and then there's "maybe testing software isn't for you".
In summary, I very much want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here, but I'm sure having a hard time of it.
- enter P as password
- enter H as hint
- click “OK”
- unmount the disk
- mount it again
- check that the dialog shows the hint H
- enter P as the password
...
To me, it seems at least as likely that that gets past a tester once as it is that a programmer writes that bug.
It still should be highly unlikely to get throug multiple rounds of testing by multiple testers, though.
A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk.
So which one will it be?
On a more serious note: this really depends on the person in question. Not everyone has that state of mind it takes to be extra wary when you find yourself in a similar situation where it went worng before. I've worked with people who made pretty severe mistakes, were pointed out, nodded 'yes', only to just make the exact same programming mistake a few months later. And again, and again.
We all like the story of "just spent a million dollars training you", but experience tells me that there is absolutely no assurance whatsoever that any random person won't be repeating that mistake in the future.
EDIT: and to be clear, of what tiny bit I know, I blame test more than dev. From the dev side I can see someone making a stupid mistake (that for the record I could just as easily make) swapping the foo with the bar, or some mis-click in IB. But I'm still astounded that this made it out of test without getting caught.
It's sad, really. My first Mac was a late 2009 MacBook Pro. I remember craving the machine before I finally splurged. After I bought it, I used nothing but a Mac for the next 6 years of my life. Those 6 years were some of the happiest times I've ever had using a computer. Everything worked flawlessly. The build quality of the machines I bought was pristine.
At the end of those 6 years my MacBook was getting buggier with each update, as was my iPhone. I ended up buying a Surface Book. I'm back on Windows for the first time since XP, and while I'm sure I made the right decision, I can't help look back 5 years ago and think that maybe the golden age is over.
But it's so much different now. It feels less like a well crafted experience and more just an alternative. It was always an alternative, but a complementary one at that. You could buy a hammer, but you could also buy this nice, shiny, beautiful hammer, weighted perfectly to swing like an extension of your arm, etc.
I started getting this feeling right around the first iPhone release after Jobs passed away. As much as I romanticized it here, I wouldn't exactly call myself an Apple fan, nor a Jobs fan, but the sort of impact and hype he could build felt a lot more exciting than Cook for me. And that kinda sucks because I know Apple has some great people with even greater ideas.
When Jobs' was asked why he would change something that was already above and beyond anything else on the market, his response was "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
Geeze, I really miss Steve Jobs.
Now, I know there are many things that can read HFS+ in Linux and Windows, but none of them cover 100%. Sometimes you can't write, sometimes you can't mount on boot, other times you can't rely on it as a long-term solution.
I spent weeks copying everything over to a NAS, and I have never looked back. Apple should have gone with ANYTHING open source, or even remotely open standards, but it seems like the lesson they've taken from Jobs' legacy is "be different for difference's sake."
I know they've open sourced the iOS kernel, but that's because it doesn't matter. It doesn't keep you locked in, like XCode keeps you locked into Mac desktops. The Apple world went from innovating in UI and design, to innovating in supply chain management and pricing structures.
Changing the password on an affected volume clears the hint but doesn’t affect the underlying encryption keys that protect the data.”
They go on to advise users to do a backup, format, restore cycle.
I guess they are that paranoid because the old password may have been leaked, and, with it, the attacker may have recovered the encryption key for the volume. Or is something else going on?
They also advise (rightfully so): ”If your disk password for any affected encrypted APFS volume is the same as the password that you use for a macOS user account or an internet service, you should change the password of the user account or internet service”
How did this thing get through testing without anyone ever typing an em dash?
I didn't have any trouble with High Sierra so far, but was disappointed to upgrade to iOS 11. It is still unstable. A lot.
This support article speaks mostly to people who have already seen the symptoms of the bug. It doesn't do anything to inform people who may still be affected but haven't noticed it yet.
Some examples:
* App crashed for no apparent reason multiple times
* Bug where on multiple occasions music won't be added to my playlists
* Bug where music not downloading after pressing the cloud icon. I always have to press it twice before the download begins, which seems like an obvious bug
Like, these are features that should be nailed down. I developed an android app which did file downloads. Press the button and download begins or is queued. Will tell users that the download fails, which is better than nothing.
I'm pretty they deliberately make it slow and clunky on Windows.
Also, for some reason the CC input for Month just showed 4 out of 12 months so I could not even subscribe. Seems like they really don't give a crap.
I installed Windows 10 on a computer and use it from time to time and the built-in anti-virus and malware protection makes me feel more comfortable running unsigned applications on Windows than I feel running them on OSX.
I find myself wishing that Apple would take similar responsibility for security (virus, malware) threats. One possible reason Apple is not doing this is because the next iteration of MacBooks will run iOS and unsigned apps will not be possible without jailbreaking.
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app
I don't understand their need to remove/hide the OS upgrades. I have to repair a friend's older MBP next week, and now I need to jump through hoops to get a legitimate installer.
If you fall more than 1 version of OS X behind and they remove the previous upgrade, you're screwed from upgrading to the latest version.
WHY, Apple?
If you don't have it in your purchases list, you can just ask a friend who has it to download Sierra for you from the Mac App Store.
Then you can just copy the Installer app on a thumb drive and run it on your Mac.
Only problem might be that maybe you can't download Sierra from a machine running High Sierra...
UPDATE: I'm wrong, see comment below.
"macOS Sierra or later doesn't appear in the Purchased tab. Instead, use the Search field in the upper-right corner to find and open the App Store page for the current version of macOS."
https://github.com/mas-cli/mas
and then use the command
mas install 1127487414
[1] It worked for me.
[2] Or so I’ve heard.
In App Store go to Store -> View My Account -> Hidden Items/Manage.
Erasing generates a new key for the data. I think it could be done without reformatting, but they still would have to read each block, decrypt with the old key, encrypt with the new, and write back the result. Testing the recovery procedure for that (how do you know where to restart that after it crashed?) would be a challenge, though.
As you point out, erasure can rotate keys. What Apple apparently didn't provide was a straightforward way for key rotation as a key management function. This surely appears to have been rushed to market.
Restore the data that you backed up in Step 1
Backup is step 2.
Or something like that. It's an admittedly implausible scenario, but good security is not based on "meh, it probably won't happen". Of course, a much more plausible scenario is password re-use.
I'll bet it will even read your password out to you with the speech synthesizer, clearly and unambiguously spelling out each of the upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols.
Well, except for stuff like this. Or the built-in advertising. Or the VBA code that beachballs in Excel Mac but not Excel Windows. Or the buggy, crashy drivers. Or the awful printing experience. Or the ability to reliably predict behaviour when plugging in external monitors or projectors. Or ...
I _think_ what most people mean by "Just Works" is "I don't have to edit configuration files in order to set up my system", not "my system is reliable and predictable."
storePassword(form[“password”])
storeHint(form[“password”])1. Lack of automated unit tests covering the code in question. 2. Lack of automated functional tests running through scenarios of setting up an encrypted volume with or without a hint. 3. Lack of strict review process for the disk utility's codebase.
This assumes automated tests are also peer-reviewed.
1 - 3 won't guarantee a bug-free project, but I doubt this bug would've made it into production.
You'd think the developer/QA that worked on that particular feature would have manually tested it at least once.
Or anyone else, it is seemingly not a hidden, elusive bug that can only be caught when a number of particular conditions concurrently happen.
According to Matheus Mariano (that seemingly was the first to find it and report to Apple):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408258
https://medium.com/@matheusmariano/new-macos-high-sierra-vul...
The only needed condition is that the Mac has a SSD, and in his words:
"I really don’t know how this went unnoticed by Apple (and anyone else). "
Doing a typo of writing passwordInput instead of passwordHintInput is not that unlikely, even though it is unfortunate.
1. Open Disk Utility and select the volume 2. Select File, Change Password 3. IMPORTANT: If on High Sierra GM, leave the hint field blank. If you've installed the update then you can provide a new hint.
Word of warning: the most secure course of action is to follow the instructions in the linked support article.
Sierra update killed that - only one display will work at a time.
prams zapped, settings fiddled with, cables tested in millions of combos and even playing with AppleGraphicsControl.kext
Any other ideas? Seems nuts an update can kill such a thing!
The updated version does come with a new full App Store installer and build number (17A405), however, so it’s as easy to install and identify programmatically as a new “point release” would be.
Good grief.
I guess thats not the posts message
I have a MacBook Pro, and the keys no longer work reliably. I also barely get 2 hours of battery life.
High Sierra keeps restarting by itself.
They removed the jack, and all ports from laptops.
They placed the charger for their wireless mouse under the mouse so you can't use it while charging, and the list goes on and on--particularly with software.
It's just not premium stuff anymore.
I've already switched to Android, and I am not buying another computer from them.
I have the 12" MacBook and the keyboard is absolutely miserable. I seriously got warned by the Apple Store when I bought it that if I got any dust on the keyboard at all that the keys would get stuck, which is totally unrealistic. It turned out to be true, which has meant I mostly just don't use a laptop anymore, as the keyboard is just so unpleasant. I have had it on my todo list to move all of my data back to my now-repaired 11" MacBook Air (which had a totally reasonable keyboard), but that entire task is just so depressing. A few days ago I was talking to someone I know who loves their 12" MacBook and how they find the keyboard just fine... and then he seriously told me that some incredibly large percentage of the time his O key doesn't work and I'm just sitting there totally dumbfounded wondering how he could even use such a machine.
That said, I could see myself sharing your same disillusionment if I have to upgrade from my 4.5 year old Macbook Pro. I don't think I've ever had a laptop for more than 3 years, and I was happy to have an even shorter cycle when it came to Apple computers. I helped a good friend purchase a new MBP, and the most I can say is that I'm happier that she's on the MBP than on the old Dell laptop that she reverted from Windows 7/10 to XP. But I'm willing to wait another year or 2 for a improved model.
However I wouldn't say all of these are terrible faults any different from what they've done before. As a vertically integrated, full-ecosystem brand Apple has consistently chosen to design towards where they feel the industry ought to be, not where it is incrementally advancing towards. They did this with thunderbolt vs firewire, and they are doing it now with bluetooth 5 vs headphone jacks. With Airbuds you can have a single earpiece (well, two) that provides high quality two-way audio for your macbook while working, your phone while driving, and your watch while running, and eventually your HomePod while walking around the house, and their handoff technology automatically switches between them. THAT is what they were designing towards, but they just didn't tell us that when they introduced the iPhone 7.
Is this good or bad? It depends. It is a lack of personal choice and a concession of liberty. Ted Kaczynski* would be appalled at everything Apple represents, for reasons that as a libertarian I can understand. However Apple's "abuse" of its monopolist position has allowed the creation of a highly integrated and seamless technology ecosystem that genuinely makes my life better, at some cost to my pocketbook, and could not have existed in a free market. And since no one is forced to buy Apple.. is that still a bad thing? It's definitely not black and white.
* Not someone I usually bring into conversations, but I saw Manhunt recently and it was rather thought provoking. Highly recommend watching, regardless of whether you typically enjoy police procedurals.
This week I have lost a whole day of my life to printer problems on windows 10. Apple stuff in the house just prints!
So experiences do differ...
Apple quite obviously sees the notebook market as secondary. I don't blame them. i-device sales far outpace notebook sales.
But not everybody feels that way. I can get a pretty damn impressive linux box for the same cost.
It usually includes updates (or myself by mistake? not sure) making my system so broken that I have to reinstall and start again from scratch.
This year I thought I'd try with the Pro after the MacBook Air wasn't upgraded with retina, but if I have to spend almost EUR 2,000 and have faulty hardware and a broken OS that shows my password in clear text, might as well spend 1/3 to get a just-as-good laptop with elementary OS on it.
I paid 275 for my Moto G5, and it's about 10 times better (IMO) than the last iPhone I owned, which cost 3 times as much.
Its too bad that the cameras tend to be subpar, though.
You can pay a lot for an Android phone too!
I have the premium devices for both (Surface Book and Google Pixel) and I still have daily annoyances.
On Windows 10, you will lose audio if the computer goes to sleep while connected to a TV via HDMI - requiring a restart. It was reported over a year ago and a similar issue exists with external monitors.
Windows Hello recognizes me but occasionally does not log me in and gives me no indication why. Is it a bug or a security feature? It's been over a year without a fix.
If I adjust the angle of my Surface Book display, the keyboard will not work for a few seconds due to a common hardware issue. It wouldn't bother me except the Surface Book is extremely top heavy and simply typing with the keyboard on your lap can make the display wobble causing the keyboard to cut out every few seconds.
The Surface Book power cable from the outlet to the brick is so short the brick cannot reach the floor from a common outlet height.
The Surface Pro 4 had minor light bleed issues. Microsoft attempted to fix it, but the new Surface Pro 2017 has even worse light bleed issues (except for the devices given to tech bloggers).
On Android:
Google removed the headphone jack from the Pixel 2.
If I ask Google to Remind Me of X when I get Home, it often reminds me days later (even though I use Google maps every day for navigation).
If I use Ok Google to dial my wife while I'm driving, it asks "Mobile or Skype". If it doesn't hear me properly, which happens 25% of the time, it repeats the question. But if I answer, "Mobile" it searches Google Maps for all Mobile gas stations :)
Ouch, who let the intern design that one?... Kidding, but really did they not QA test this and how did nobody at QA not say this was a terrible idea? I'll stick to my wireless trackball..
The mouse also just looks weird when flipped over to charge, and you can't really try to even charge it while it's in a backpack if you wanted to, due to the 90deg angle it makes when plugged in.
That certainly seems like a more logical explanation than literally no one at Apple anticipating such an obvious design consequence for a major accessory.
How old is your Macbook Pro? Mine is 4 years and I still get 7-8 hours of charge even though I have been using the Battery almost everyday.
Just as I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect place to live, a perfect person to spend your life with, a perfect food to eat every day of your life, I also don't think the perfect computer company exists, the perfect laptop exists... But when I weigh all the conveniences and quality of my MBP with other non-Apple machines I've owned, it really is a no-brainer for me.
I guess the 15" has a bigger battery.
Reset the SMC. It was doing this multiple times per day for me also, but it hasn't been an issue since I did this a couple days ago.
I have to reset the SMC or the computer will restart by itself while I'm in the middle of programming..?
This is a EUR2000 laptop we're talking about, not a Game Boy.
No, it's not. Try recovering your iCloud password from the web right now. I couldn't believe it either.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204921
"For your security, recovery includes a waiting period that may be several days or longer depending on the information you can provide to verify your identity. Apple Support cannot help you shorten this time. "
The keys are so shallow that after normal use (no crumbs or anything like that) they start having problems.
As for battery life, they had to make it 4mm thinner just for the sake of it, and the screen sucks all the battery. I wish it was thicker but I could actually use it without keeping plugging it in.
Apple you POS! THe only thing that keeps your MBP some what usasble is the "so far" stellar state restore post crash.
What are you on about? Audio jack is there.
>They placed the charger for their wireless mouse under the mouse so you can't use it while charging
And? Mouse lasts MONTHS on a single charge. It notifies you 12 hours ahead that it needs charging. A 5 min charge can last you an hour.
I think this is a lot better than having a hole on the side of your mouse at all times.
This is an issue only to those who've never used it.
>and the list goes on and on--particularly with software.
Please list it. I'm dying to know more!
>It's just not premium stuff anymore.
Silly opinion.
>I've already switched to Android, and I am not buying another computer from them.
We're talking about Macs. What does Android have to do with it? You're mixing up your hate memes.
PS: You clearly never even owned a Macbook Pro. You're probably getting your "facts" from bullshit 4chan memes.
But it only pops out when there's like 1% battery left in the mouse - basically making sure you will lose power soon. The sheer lack of thinking here boggles the mind. Guys, it's an alert, it's not useful at all if I get it right before the bad thing happens.
How would you like it if I switched on my turn signal 1 second before I actually turn my vehicle in front of you?
- users would have a better experience if the mouse was wireless
- if left to their own devices, users will tend to leave the mouse plugged in and use it as a wired mouse
so they solved that contradiction by taking away the option of missing out on wirelessness.
They removed the audio jack from their phones and their "pro" laptops barely have any ports left. Some people use those, you know.
> I think this is a lot better than having a hole on the side of your mouse at all times.
The OP clearly doesn't.
> Please list it. I'm dying to know more!
Just a few of the top of my head:
mDNSResponder, GPU drivers, WiFi issues, Safari used to crash a lot, goto fail, there was the fun one were the GPU driver was loaded too late so that ... something something color profiles ... your screen had a blue tint the whole fucking time. Lots of good stuff, really.
> Silly opinion.
I'd love to elaborate on this one but I'm afraid my MBP will overheat when continue typing.
From the tone you're using and the things you're saying it looks like you're lost and are looking for Reddit.
I have no interest in taking your comment seriously and reply to your accusation that I am not writing this comment from a MacBook Pro.
What baffles me about the MM 2, why didn’t they put a notch at the top so you could plug the Lightning cable in and use it while it is charging?
The hate on the new macbook pro's was especially interesting - they are solid machines and my company had no issues as they started provisioning over the old ones for new employees.