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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

That blog post is the biggest load of unadulterated bull excrement I have read in a very long time. It is pure unsubstantiated Apple bashing.

Get a grip man. An OS update fails on one machine and you find it perfectly reasonable to extrapolate this to Apple going to the dogs and that Apple management should resign ? What planet do you live on ? Your blog post is the very definition of overexaggeration.

Those of us who manage larger number of Apple devices have not seen any issues with OS X updates.

Sure there is always the possibility of an edge-case where an OS update can go wrong. But that can happen on ANY OS ... Windows, Linux, BSD.

Sheesh !

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Hardly surprising that people expect premium experiences after paying premium price for both software and hardware. That's why people are so easy to bash Apple, because they say that they are perfection. When something happens that are not perfection, people blame Apple.

You get the response based on the expectations you set. And with both price and messaging, Apple puts the expectations very high, while sometimes failing to reach them.

> premium price

does Apple still have a premium price? feels like all the manufactures have similar prices to Apple nowadays.

random sample: https://geizhals.eu/?cmp=2285948&cmp=2566291

disclaimer: I just picked a random "professional" apple device and hunted for something close to compare. Sample is likely not representative.

(The largest constraint was selecting another device with a 2560×1600 display resolution.)

If you think those two are equivalent you are out of your mind.

Looks like the site miscategorized the Dell one as "ultracompact professional" when it isn't. I didn't double check that, sorry.

Here's another one:

https://geizhals.eu/?cmp=2285948&cmp=2511228

They cost as much as any similar laptop. In fact in the space, they are very competetive. This has been discussed here ad nauseum.

BMWs get flat tires too

The price of macOS is $0.00.

The price of MacOS is sending telemetry to Apple on every exec().

This is a gross misrepresentation of what is going on.

Oh so the machine isn't sending a hash of the binary on exec? Tell me what I got wrong.

A hash of a binary is not "telemetry", is what you got wrong.

I don't understand what the difference is from the perspective of the user.

Telemetry is collected and stored and potentially linked to a user. This is not.

How exactly do you know it's not? Do they even say it isn't? Why would you trust them at this point?

Because they do not include any kind of identifier for the user in the network data. Why would you store a big list of hashes? That would make no sense.

If I were working at Apple, I'd be low-key proud of this blog post, if anything.

One upgrade bug in 20 years. That's respectable.

What's not respectable are how the bugs delivered in the upgrades have been increasing.

On the other hand, MacOS update failing only _once_ in 16 years is commendable.

I mean, yeah - that's why it's so valuable.

When something is so rigorously guaranteed that it's almost absolute, it's able to change your behavior, dramatically. It's incredibly liberating. It's like turning on the water tap, and never fearing that you're about to drink something toxic. You can do things quickly and casually, because you know you've got a solid bit of "terra firma" to stand on. If we didn't have things like this, we couldn't have i.e. airplane travel.

It's absolutely commendable for them being at such a high watermark for reliability, but - much like a doctor saving sick patients, or the mail service delivering letters, aspirationally speaking "nothing less than perfection is acceptable".

Unsure if this is a parody or not.

Glad I am not the only one who read through all that and was confused why they went to all the effort to write such a long piece about a failed software update.

One failure in 19 years is pretty damn good imho. I’ve had more macOS updates fail (and Windows and Linux and Solaris and OpenBSD) in that same time frame.

Sorry but this is a pointless post. I learned nothing other than the writer really seems to like to write.

As a counter point to his post. I’ve updated my 6 machines to Bug Sur and they have all been fine. In fact I would say Big Sur has been one of the “good ones” compared to recent years.

The point of OS X is that you pay a premium and now put up with a bunch of crap from Apple to not have to deal with stuff that "can happen on any OS." When you have to deal with it why bother? Why not run Linux?

For "pure unsubstantiated Apple bashing" that article is very modest though. macOS updates haven't failed for me so far, but I still notice a general decline in system software quality on macOS in the last 3..5 years, if the next OS update would fail for me, assuming that this is just another sign of a slow but steady decline would be very natural.

I wouldn't be too quick to speak for others.

We've got a few thousand Macs and have seen a higher than normal proportion of kernel panics on Intel models since the very fast 11.15.x run.

So far, in addition to the usual panics on T2 devices from HID changes, the new ones are being triggered shortly after login to certain user profiles, especially when external video is connected.

No funny kexts, no custom drivers, just jamf and some very light profile and application level management. It's happening primarily to profiles migrated from pre-MDM / open directory bound Macs, but I only saw it in person yesterday when plugging in for a conference. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.

I think you are too “hard”, is a normal “surge” from a guy who has a trouble with a macOS update for the first time in 19 years! I also use macOS and I never had troubles with the updates but we can’t ignore that macOS in the lasts 6/7 years get updates a lot more frequently, so it’s normal normal have more troubles.

Surely Apple is not going to the dogs but is doing a lot more things/software/hardware and macOS is not “quite perfect” as it was 20 years ago. Also with the ARM chips Apple is doing a lot of confusion, especially with recovery mode/reinstall/format.

PS: is not my blog.

Linux upgrades don't fail that catastrofically. For example, a Linux upgrade can fail in a way where the GUI is not operable, but you log in into the console and fix it. Worst case scenario you log in in single user mode and fix it. Worse case scenario the kernel doesn't boot, you chroot from a live CD and you fix it. Everything is fixable.

The problem with macOS, or Windows, is that they are proprietary operating systems, if something goes wrong, the only way to fix it is to reinstall everything, that to me is not an acceptable fix.

If you're experiencing volume corruption, or can no longer guarantee the integrity of your system, at that point does it matter that it's open source? At what point do you cut the investigation, reinstall and get on with your day?

Proprietary OSes are less flexible but not to the extreme you're describing. In both instances there are faults you can recover from, and faults where you can't.

Edit, to rephrase my question as not rhetorical: I'm genuinely interested in knowing if troubleshooting this type of fault is a common occurrence to people outside of OS/kernel programming, as I lack experience with it.

Projection, much?

The blog post states that the person has experienced a steady long-term degradation in the quality OS X delivers for them. I understand the failed upgrade was just the final straw before posting this writ.

And as a bystander, the post didn't even register as particularly harsh to me. It's what you write when you've seen things go down hill and you just hit another drop. Seems perfectly appropriate to me.

“Traumatizing”

‘This memory will never be erased from my mind”

Amen. One bad experience in 19 years and its “wahh Apple is trash now”?!

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