macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL | Hacker News Reader

macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL

developer.apple.com

293 pointsAudiophilip334 comments

15.8.2 isn't released.

This is a report from the developer forums where people are supposed to report these bugs.

The second response in the thread is an Apple engineer acknowledging the bug, assigning a number, and asking the person to retest when new builds are available.

If you only read the comments here you'd come away with a completely different impression of what's happening.

That's true, but I'm sorry, telling them to test it themselves every time a new release comes out because "I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship" is just stupid. It's a liability-reducing strategy benefiting only Apple, not a nice way to treat customers.

Also, not having a regression test that catches OpenGL being completely broken on many common hardware configurations seems pretty bad. Yes, OpenGL on macOS is deprecated, but guess what, deprecating it was also stupid. It was a legal decision made by Apple lawyers pursuing a particular litigation strategy vs Nvidia that caused Apple's withdrawal from Khronos group. It wasn't a sound technical decision.

Both of these things make it seem like the lawyers are in charge at Apple rather than the engineers.

> deprecating it was also stupid. It was a legal decision made by Apple lawyers pursuing a particular litigation strategy vs Nvidia that caused Apple's withdrawal from Khronos group.

I'm not aware of the context here but that sounds like an interesting story. Could you give more details or do you know where I could read more about this?

I'm not aware of any good writeups. Neither Apple nor Nvidia wanted to publicize it. Here's the story as I know it:

When Apple decided to make their own GPU, all the other GPU vendors sued them for patent infringement. Apple countersued, and the litigation went on for many, many years. In the case of Nvidia there were also previous legal disputes over liability for Macbook GPU hardware defects, which meant that Apple had cut all ties with Nvidia years prior. This probably led to Apple's legal fight with Nvidia being especially prolonged and vicious.

Khronos Group, which produces the OpenGL and Vulkan standards, has ties to Nvidia. I don't know all the details but it seems Apple's lawyers decided that they would block implementation of any new Khronos standards in Apple products due to the Nvidia connection. As a result the OpenGL implementation in macOS was frozen at version 4.1 (July 2010) for many years, even prior to deprecation, lacking important features like compute shaders. Of course Vulkan support for macOS was completely out of the question. They also stopped work on Safari's implementation of WebGL 2 (which was left in a half-done state for years until it was eventually pushed to completion by Google engineers including myself). Additionally, Apple successfully maneuvered the WebGPU working group out of Khronos to W3C, and vetoed SPIR-V on the web, eventually resulting in WGSL.

So the legal dispute between Apple and Nvidia had a big influence on the industry. If Apple hadn't been allergic to Khronos standards, in an optimistic scenario we might have had a significantly better Vulkan standard with contributions from Apple's Metal team, Vulkan+SPIR-V support on macOS and iOS, and even SPIR-V on the web, which would have given us a truly cross-platform modern graphics API to replace OpenGL and made writing portable graphics software significantly easier in the last decade.

Of course today all this seems a lot less relevant with the rise of coding agents that can port a codebase or even a binary executable between platforms with a few prompts. So it will soon be a forgotten historical curiosity.

The easiness of porting is always exaggerated, first of all, all 8 and 16 bit home computers had their own ways, the game consoles for the most part ignore Khronos, and still there is a thriving market, because game devs contrary to FOSS folks, implement a middleware engine during breakfast, and move on with their lives.

Secondly, thanks to extension spaghetti from Khronos APIs, the portability across devices, OS and computing platforms is hardly much different than coding to multiple graphics backends.

There are hardly any Khronos APIs related content at game conferences, that isn't done by Khronos themselves.

So even without coding agents it has never been that industry relevant, other than on open source communities.

Games are not the only users of graphics APIs. Anyway, it's true that Vulkan/SPIR-V support on mac/iOS and web would not be a portability panacea by itself. That said, it certainly wouldn't have hurt either. And if portability between all desktop and mobile devices with a single API was a realistic possibility, there would have been more interest in fixing the portability issues that remained. But why bother to care about Vulkan portability when you're going to need an abstraction layer above it anyway for iOS/Metal support.

Point is, the reasons we didn't get any even minimally portable native graphics API this cycle are more legal than technical.

I find this pattern so funny. Khronos and Microsoft anticipate 20 graphics vendor APIs, so 2 portable standard APIs are created. The common denominator problem stifles competition and leads to unexposed functionality some vendors have or won’t bother developing because of it. It also introduces a lot of implementation problems that would not exist with vendor-specific APIs. How many vendor APIs were there really back then and now? A handful across industries, less on specific platforms.

I see this pattern again and again. For example in the manufacturing industry there’s a network standard OPC UA. It sucks. It tries to extend to absolutely everything (wtf database interfaces?). Like you say, the “integrators” just write a middle layer and move on with their days.

interesting story, but the fact that Apple and Nvidia were sueing each other doesn't seem any reason to drop all open standards. I would say they did it because of arrogance - ie. we're Apple and everything we do is better, therefore our graphics API is superior than any other

TBH, I'm not saying "DTS Engineer" isn't an actual Apple engineer, but it feels very LLM-written. For something like that, I wouldn't want it to guarantee that a fix can or will be done in any sort of timeframe.

I hope it does get fixed, but Apple actually has a bad track-record with another deprecated API, AppleAL (OpenAL). They broke it in a very interesting way in Tahoe where mono-channel audio on Aarch64 (not through Rosetta) did not play and it was broken through all the betas. I believe it actually may still be broken today. The workarounds were either mono-to-faux-stereo channel duplication or switch to openal-soft.

OpenGL is an even bigger deal so I don't see a world where it doesn't get fixed, but I also thought exactly the same way with the previous issue. It seems that Apple does not have any older video games in their testing apparatus.

Some references on the issue:

1. https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/issues/16499

2. https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/39540396560145-Ma...

OpenAL was terrible on Android as well, but audio on Android was terrible at the time anyway. Game developers had issues like explosion sounds playing half a second after the visual effect. Google made excuses for years saying it’s not their fault somehow, while it was fine on iOS, before they eventually fixed a scheduling mistake they introduced.

15.8.2 isn't released, but the 15.8.2 release candidate clearly is. I don't think think it's that crazy for people to be at least somewhat concerned that a fairly common important library got broken a bugfix release to a maintenance update that came out a month ago for a major version that came out two years ago without anyone internal testing it before publishing the RC.

> 15.8.2 isn't released, but the 15.8.2 release candidate clearly is

That’s how release candidates work.

The headline could have included RC to make it accurate. As submitted it’s pretty misleading.

They used to make these beta versions private so only ios/macos developers could test on them to report bugs to get them fixed before public release. They since opened it up to anyone who wants to install it which generates a lot of outrage from the peanut gallery when the beta has bugs.

I think the reason so many people hit this in particular is enabling Sequoia beta channel is the only way to prevent the machine from wanting to upgrade to a newer major release.

... and the updates that come through the beta channel aren't clearly labelled as "beta" or "release candidate".

I've always found that quite strange. Clearly the information is present because they're not signed with the same keys.

The problem is that this is a well established pattern with this operating system:

- A bug or regression is identified in a beta or release candidate. People quickly come to defend Apple saying it will surely get fixed.

- The bug or regression is released. People quickly come to defend Apple saying it's not a big deal, there are workarounds, and it will probably get fixed.

- The bug or regression is now the status quo. Why are you rehashing old news? Nobody cares, this impacts only 1% of people, you're imagining things, thread locked, user banned, et cetera.

The time to complain loudly and broadly is _before_ the bug or regression becomes the new status quo for the platform.

This sounds more like a story than a real issue. Do you have specific examples you can point to?

I see this problem almost every year with macOS updates. Here are two examples that I recall of the top of my head. They are already a few years old but really annoyed me, because I spent the time to write detailed bug reports, kept re-testing the issue, and in the end Apple shipped the bugs and never fixed them:

- use of some custom NSTextAttachmentCells was broken when they added force touch dictionary lookup to NSTextView. As far as I know it was never fixed. The API is still documented and if you use it it will cause crashes as soon as someone uses force touch in a text view.

- fat binaries (32/64) stopped working when the 32bit binary uses Objective C garbage collection even when running on a 64bit system and the 64bit binary does not use garbage collection. This is clearly an error, Apple did not care about it. The only way to make such an app launchable again on 64bit is to remove the 32bit binary (that wouldn't run on a 64bit machine anyway)

MST? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multi-Stream_Trans...

But that's not a bug. It's a design choice.

The problem is that as far as I know the only way to pin a Mac to an older major version is to put yourself into the beta stream, so people (including me) are getting these not because they want developer access but just because they don't want to upgrade.

Honestly I have next to 0 expectation that anything gets fixed. I've had bug numbers assigned to reliably system-crashing issues that were left in for years. Currently we've got a "libusb claiming a device will panic your kernel" issue in stable releases for half a year already. Reporting to Apple means nothing.

macOS isn't FOSS - the devs should be testing + not asking users to do their job.

Thanks for the context, the state of HN has been quite sad in recent years, now people (hopefully, and not bots) read the title and then go on random anecdotes, dumb generalisations and awkward tangents.

>and awkward tangents

Especially on special internet forums, HN included, bots are generally paid for by professional influence campaigns so..

Yeah..

Whatever those AI's have to do to shape the conversation to get their message in, that's what they'll do. And that's going to sound pretty awkward to human ears.

An Apple engineer acknowledged the bug? That comment reeks strongly of Claude. I have a feeling that somebody did not use their brain and the response is an auto-response by Claude. Also things like attaching a sysdiagnose is useless and is well known to be hoops Apple requires bug reporters to jump through with no benefit to either party.

You also make it sound like the Apple engineer assigned the number but the number was auto-assigned when the bug report was filed. The same number was present in the first post so it could not have been assigned by the Apple engineer.

As far as I can see the Apple engineer did nothing at all. The attitude of that Apple engineer is worse than staying silent on this bug.

> The attitude of that Apple engineer is worse than staying silent on this bug.

The Apple engineer opened the ticket which is how these bugs get prioritized and fixed.

Staying silent or not responding would mean it doesn’t get fixed.

The Apple engineer didn’t open the ticket. The original reporter did. Perhaps actually look at the assigned number before jumping to defend Apple.

A user feedback is different to an actual radar that will be fixed by a dev.

However since they didn't post a radar ID, nor did they mention filing a radar, this is all pure speculation

> Also things like attaching a sysdiagnose is useless and is well known to be hoops Apple requires bug reporters to jump through with no benefit to either party.

As a former Apple SWE that has read innumerable sysdiagnose reports, this statement is bullshit.

External bug reports very commonly have a variation of "THIS IS BROKEN YOU SUCK FIX THIS" as the main note. Even with a crash log attached that's not at all helpful. A sysdiagnose gives a state of the system the reporter has in front of them. You can't triage a bug with "FIX NOW" as the description.

I know I know, Apple has infinity dollars and every SWE should just magically fix bugs without needing to triage them first. Every external bug reports very is also a special snowflake that deserves concierge VIP serve and a dedicated SWE team to fix.

I hear you. The problem is real and I have no idea how to even start looking for a solution here.

Problem is, even when a bugreport is very well written[1] with all the details, it's either gets ignored for years or flagged as duplicate and then ignored for years or closed as wontfix and then ignored for years.

I've given up reporting bugs to Apple many years ago.

[1] https://egorfine.com/en/articles/priceless-bugreports/

“Most bug reports are bad” and “most good bug reports aren’t handled well” can both be true.

As a macOS user, my most recent datapoint is a crash in Apple Music that I’ve submitted probably a few dozen crash reports for, along with steps that trivially and consistently reproduce the crash - from my perspective, the crash was introduced in macOS 26 last year, and has received zero attention since then.

Did you read the bug report? This is not your garden variety THIS IS BROKEN YOU SUCK FIX THIS bug. It is respectful, it has a minimal reproducer, and it is communicated clearly. There’s no reason to stall it using the sysdiagnose requirement.

And yes, this is not the first time I’ve seen Apple requiring sysdiagnose for an excellently written report. Even John Siracusa would get these sysdiagnose requests; it’s a stalling tactic being applied indiscriminately.

If Apple cannot distinguish between an angry nontechnical user that SHOUTS IN UPPERCASE and a developer that communicates professionally with an equal, that’s Apple’s problem.

Especially since sysdiagnose contain so much info, it’s bad opsec to give that info over. Unless you repro in a fresh VM maybe.

Because you're testing pre-release software on a dedicated machine... right?

You've convinced yourself that asking for a sysdiagnose is only ever used as a stalling tactic by Apple. There's not much I can say that will change your mind.

A minimal reproduction is great in a bug report but it's still not a complete in-situ snapshot of the machine.

I didn’t say sysdiagnose is only used as a stalling tactic. It may be useful if the reporter’s minimal reproducer doesn’t reproduce. But requiring it indiscriminately is definitely a stalling tactic.

The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating. We are in the thousand papercut stage where lots of small things just don’t work properly.

One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.

I've been playing around with RealityKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit) lately, it's their SceneKit replacement (they deprecated it this year).

On tvOS if a frame takes too long it just starts skipping frames and runs at 20 FPS. It won't recover after it happens. ThermalState is .nominal, so it's not that. There's also no way to just say "render as fast as possible" so you can measure performance, instead every device does throttling/pacing and it's completely opaque.

Anyway, I've had a developer account for 10+ years, and run into stuff like this constantly where you just can't get things to work properly. The framework isn't used much, so it's probably just broken.

I ported the game to SDL3/Zig and wouldn't you know it I can run continuously at 60 fps.. It's disappointing because I'm on board with targeting a single platform if I can utilize the hardware more effectively and make something special with it. But instead it's constantly an uphill battle of dealing with the opaqueness/brokenness of the platform. If I open a feedback request I'll probably just get told it's a bug, and maybe they fix it next WWDC.

You can most certainly render “as fast possible”. You are probably using a CAMetal layer render target with a delegate that is vsync’d to device refresh. You have to roll your own delegate or render target instead. Apple has a sample project in the Metal framework on how to do this.

The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.

The iPhone 18 Pro has been out exactly a month now and they still haven't pushed a fix for the popping/crackling speaker issue:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-c...

I still get crackling or popping many times a day.

Also, the annoying render stutters during scrolling across many apps haven't been fixed since iOS 26 was introduced (they were probably there before, but Liquid Glass made it worse). Even the iPhone 18 Pro suffers from it (also checked on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air).

Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.

My Nexus 5's "underwater" mic issue never got addressed. Wouldn't be surprised if the next thing iOS copies from Android is, "Audio bug that just never gets fixed."

(If you have a problem with this comment, please point out which part is untrue or unfair. iOS has copied many Android features in recent release, the Nexus 5 had an audio bug that was never fixed, and we are in a thread talking specifically about an iOS audio bug that seems to not be getting fixed. Please do not treat the downvote button like you're on Reddit.)

My Iphone has had some bugs in the last year that are so sloppy yet impactful its almost funny. About half the time im looking at my lock screen notifications, the screen will lock less than a second after touching the screen. I have had other issues as well, but for a company with so much money I expect a little more craftsmanship.

I have had other issues as well but something that actively locks my phone while I am obviously using it is an extremely frustrating start to my day.

Yeah iOS is headed the same way.

I now get stuck in the camera app half the time I try to use it, and other nonsense.

Same here.

IME on the lock screen I’ll be interacting with the media controls and the screen will just turn off, like I’m not doing any interaction.

It’s funny how that basic of functionality is broken.

I really appreciate that I'm not the only one. Using Apple software is increasingly an experience in navigating a minefield of bizarre UX mistakes.

The big concern for me is if I ever find myself in an emergency situation and I need to use my phone to contact someone. Apple's iPhone is so inconsistent and unreliable even in the best of conditions.

my ipad does that, no interaction with anything on the lockscreen will reset the timeout timer

This is a personal anecdote - I'm a games developer, working predominantly on Windows. Since last year I have to use a Mac to work with our iOS builds and I honestly don't understand people saying Mac is for developers - the number of actual outright bugs I run into every week makes windows look like something that came out of NASA. I eagerly awaited the release of MacOS 27 to maybe finally address some of them, and of course it just traded one set of problems for another. It's just shockingly bad - and unlike a true Linux system you have very little ability to fix some of those issues yourself too.

The people that say that usually equate UNIX with developers, because naturally on other platforms the software materialises out of nothing.

The latest macOS, after a lot of praise, has proven to be really buggy to me. At least liquid glass only had poor readability, but now windows go missing/turn invisible almost daily and it’s getting seriously annoying.

It's so extremely buggy! I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release) because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe, but it has fixed no bugs which annoyed me with Tahoe and introduced so many new ones. Mission Control frequently switches to the wrong window (perfectly reproducible bugs which result in the wrong window coming forward). And in Mission Control, windows now overlap each other, are overlapped by the dock, and end up partially outside the screen, in ways they just never did in any earlier macOS release. The Launchpad replacement part of Spotlight in 26 was always super buggy but has gotten even more buggy in 27. Just yesterday the WiFi menu in the menu bar beach balled.

iOS text input is also super buggy now, with frequent rendering glitches where the new blue words from "AI" suggestions or whatever overlap other text, there are stale blue squiggles which are hold-overs from grammatical issues which have since been fixed, completely nonsensical grammatically nonsense suggestions, etc.

The decrease in quality from 15 to 26 and then 26 to 27 is staggering.

> because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe

Is today the day you learn there is Apple astroturfing on this forum?

You'd think there is no point in astroturfing the latest macos. They make no money from you or me upgrading their OS software. If anything it is a net negative for apple's brand to have me upgrade and face the B.S. newer OSs saddle upon you. The turfing would do better to keep me on my current OS if the goal is to increase my pleasurable feelings towards the apple brand.

New releases of macOS often drop older hardware, so perhaps pressuring people to be running the latest version incentivizes regular hardware upgrades. Especially considering Apple's push for local AI; new versions of macOS can gate AI features behind newer hardware.

They make no money from you either way this quarter, but people talking about bad experiences are sure to deter new customers. I guess Apple is just counting on their walled garden to keep existing customers from leaving.

Entangling the whole system with the tentacles of an AI squid does not quite equate to "making no money from you or me".

It might be, people have high expectations of this place.

> I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release)

One would think that after this many macOS releases, all the techies would have learned to wait till the .1/.2 update drops with the critical bugfixes...

I mean it's literally identical today as it was on release day. Exactly 0 of the new or old bugs I experience have been touched since then.

And I write software which other people sometimes run on macOS; I need to know whether that software works on the new OS, and fix it if it doesn't.

> Exactly 0 of the new or old bugs I experience have been touched since then

I mean, that's at least in part because the first update (confusingly numbered .2) isn't out yet. Which is pretty normal for Apple releases. Wait a few months for a stable experience.

> I need to know whether that software works on the new OS, and fix

Yeah, I get the pain. To some extent this is just the price for being a developer (and I have had similar early-adopter issues on Windows for the same reason)

> Mission Control

Turns out rewriting the entire thing was probably a bad idea

Audio problems aren't new. I remember that the last 10.9 build I was still using in 2016 had this bug where sound would just stop working every now and then. `sudo pkill coreaudiod` fixed it every time.

I have an issue like that on my M1.

I'll need to try that! I have that issue like once a month on the macbook my work gave me, and rebooting was the only thing I figured out that works.

Actually it feels a lot like Apple before NeXT's acquisition.

I remember that period. System 7,8,8.6 were all so fragile compared to Windows. No progressive crashes... just sudden lockups.

And endless beach ball of death, where the mouse would still move the ball, but nothing else would be happening.

The beachball arrived with OS X. On Classic MacOS it was a watchface.

It used to be black and white.

That sounds right.

Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.

(But damn if I encounter a bug or an issue. Just reporting those have made hordes of Apple fans attack me, in response to a standard technical bug report.)

Youngsters have to understand that Apple's quality was so bad, not only did they fail to deliver in a few products with industry partners, the teams weren't even capable of writing a new operating system.

Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.

Copeland... (That was the actual name of supposed future Apple's OS 30 years ago, sounds kinda different with 2026 perspective.)

Copland, no E (named for Aaron Copland, the American composer)

Very true. People that manage to be nostalgic about system 8 or 9 mystify me.

Or Windows 7 for that matter.

Windows 7 was the best OS ever made. I had one installation running without any slowdowns or rot for more than 9 years.

My personal favorite is the alarm clock on iOS, after the first time you dismiss the alert with the phone unlocked, it reappears as a transparent dialog 10% of the size of a normal one (i.e. so small not even a stylus could click the buttons). The mashed ball of widgets can only be swiped off the screen.

The Font Book on macOS 27 seems broken - user fonts never show up.

We’re also apparently in a “Settings doesn’t search” build for the Mac once again.

I would agree with you if this wasn't a release candidate. I would wait and see at this point.

The window manager bugs have been present since the first macOS 27 beta, and have made it unchanged to the current stable release.

On the latest production release for Intel Macs, I can no longer connect to two external displays at the same time. I have to plug them in one at a time (sometimes multiple times before they register), and reconnect them after sleep. A very annoying regression.

The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.

This bug is one of many papercuts in Apple software.

Here’s another: Hide My Email’s “Forward To” feature is broken. You can’t change which email address messages get forwarded to. I have nearly 500 Hide My Email addresses and want to change the forwarding address, but can’t because the feature is broken.

Wait, this is terrible news. I was planning to migrate off of Gmail using that feature

It does work great generally. Here's what changing your foward-to looks like: https://imgur.com/a/feSBCCN

I migrated family email hosting from Google Workspace to Apple iCloud+ Custom Email Domains a few years ago and it's been smooth sailing. Few people realize that Apple has been a high-volume email host since long before Google Mail. This is the guide I used: https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...

I also used Hide My Email to de-Google. I changed the email on basically every online service I use from my Gmail to a unique Hide My Email address for each service.

At one point, when I had fewer Hide My Email addresses, I was able to change my Forward To address. But now when I try to change it, it simply doesn't work.

I see the same screen as in your screenshot, but selecting a different Forward To address and submitting does nothing. There's no error message; the Forward To address just doesn't change.

I've been trying to update my Forward To address for months on multiple versions of macOS and iOS, and it doesn't work. I think the bug is related to how many Hide My Email addresses I have, since I was able to update it when I had fewer.

Another annoying thing, even if updating the Forward To address did work, is that you can only have one Forward To address for all your Hide My Email addresses. You can't choose separate Forward To addresses for different Hide My Email addresses.

I for one stopped holding my breath after witnessing a pretty major issue introduced in a macOS beta carry into the stable release for the dozenth time.

As if this is the only example in support of what the parent said? Or as if these are restricted to release candidates and beta versions?

Yup I have the same problem with audio. And I found more problems last two years than in previous 10. I wonder if that due to some internal cuts in quality assurance or moving to AI and vibe coding more code than devs can review. But it may be subjective feeling.

you really have to wonder how they managed to mess up this bad, and why they're doing nothing about it.

local search is both broken on my mac as well as iPhone. I search for an app, and its app store entry OR settings pop up, not the app.

how does this persist? do they not use their own products anymore? have they simply given up?

Finder search has been broken for me for years I think, and that smart folder "Recents" never worked properly. It's puzzling how they can let this happen.

My iPhone 15 has a weird one. I beta tested the glass updates. Part way through the beta it broke, and my phone will only show glass visuals during movement. Once it stops it turns opaque. This happens across the entire phone. Resetting the phone from a backup doesn’t fix the issue. My only fix is to wipe my data and start over. Hardly a solution. I’m no longer on the beta, even a few major versions updated now. Issue remains.

My macOS 27 m4 MacBook 128GB ram has in the last 3 days: completely locked up and went black screen (after reboot it had a stacktrace that windowserver crashed and didn’t come back) ; had a full on kernel panic, which later an AI agent analyzing the panic dump said it’s because the iOS simulator was somehow leaking resources and watchdog triggered a the kernel panic.

I genuinely have more issue with my audio peripherals (USB microphone, bluetooth earbuds) on the M4 Macbook that my work gave me than on my Arch Linux desktop. Around once a month the Macbook will inexplicably not be able to receive input from mic or output to my earbuds (or both!) despite the OS settings still showing the current input/output as selected correctly. Rebooting somehow fixes it, but I'm at a loss to understand how the computer/OS that costs thousands of dollars and is supposed to "just work" because of being completely designed by a single entity manages to struggle with this when the completely arbitrarily selected set of hardware and software components that I threw together for my desktop seem to never have any problem like this nowadays.

It’s still better than windows but I agree that the trend is down and not upward.

That scares me because what are the alternatives ? Windows is even worst and no light in sight, Linux is Linux… and that’s all.

Mine has been doing that for a fair few months actually. Sometimes flipping the output to something different then back again sorts it, other times a reboot is required.

Yes. The top menu access for apps full screened in Tahoe stop working. WTF.

My Mac has developed the issue of slowing down over time if not rebooted. Heavy GPU use accelerates the decay. It feels just like swapping to disk except it's not - swap usage always 0. I didn't have this issue before Tahoe.

We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing

  agentcall( claude, data_thing, "please save this file to the user's home directory" )

and the author of that code will pat him/herself on the back then form a habit of telling his/her friends "I am an engineer, I have built over 100 software programs spanning multiple continents".

I already see this behavior out of the tech support class that likes to participate in bureaucratic processes among gen z. The standards and expectations for what is colloquially "engineer", outside of bonafide engineering circles, has really fallen over the last two decades.

The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.

https://github.com/cofob/autogenlib

I once worked in L1 support, and because we had to take calls @07:00 sharp (we were the only number a company of 40k people could call) and Windows updates were still a multi-hour endeavor, I stuck to rebooting daily (or shutdown+startup) all devices I use heavily, including MacOS.

Over the past 8 years that has basically solved every bug all my colleagues ran into with MacOS. At some point my boss wasn't getting calendar notifications anymore for a couple weeks, "did you try and reboot?" fixed it in 5m. He later mentioned he hadn't rebooted in 7 weeks.

I don't understand why people treat Apple devices like unbreakable analog AM radios, they're very complex computers like any Windows or Linux machines, with a huge state machine beneath it that is easier to reset daily/weekly than to keep working properly for months.

My Intel Mac didn't need to be rebooted. I would leave it running for months with no issues. Apple devices genuinely used to be that stable.

I get that you can't generally expect things to be that stable. But in my experience they used to be and now they're not!

My M4 Max was probably that stable too until Tahoe, although I rarely left it running for more than a few weeks between updates.

This isn't happening for me, if by "over time" you mean "several weeks" of heavy GPU use without a reboot. Consider the possibility that the root cause is not macOS.

By "over time" I mean that if I run local LLMs or play graphics-intensive games (like No Man's Sky's native Mac port) I can start seeing up to half-second (or longer) delays in switching apps, starting videos and much more with less than 5 days of uptime. Heavy enough usage will reproduce it within a few hours.

If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.

I have the 128GB/8TB M4 Max and I'm not even coming close to using up all or even most of the unified memory. I suspect it may be related to some form of fragmentation, though I have no way to know how.

I believe you, just suggesting that the issue may not be quite as general. I have a 64GB Studio M1 Max, so the years of hardware/firmware differences between us may be relevant as well. Hope you find a solution!

It didn't happen to me before the update, so I suspect it must be something about the update or how it interacts with the software on my system. Still, it's one of those issues I have no hope of seeing solved, because at this rate nobody doing development at Apple is actually going to leave a Mac running for days on end...

I was seeing a bug that was very similar to what you describe! I fixed it on my Mac by deleting the .CFUserTextEncoding file in my home directory.

Huh, that file seems to have existed since I first set up the machine! Do you have any more information on this? For me it just contains the bytes `0x0:0x0`. How'd you know to try that and do you know how it worked at all?

Edit: The modification date is actually earlier than the added date -- it looks like the file was transferred by Migration Assistant from my previous machine! Not sure if that's important.

I think I figured it out when I experienced a repeating crash in the drop down control in the network settings, and then looked at the crash report, there was something about localization in the backtrace, so I removed the file in an attempt to fix that and after a logout/ login the weird lag went away too. In my case the file had the value for UTF-8 and something in Tahoe’s text system goes into a loop when that file is present. I’ve had the same file for ages because it fixed a problem with pbcopy/emacs interaction. I wound up working around that issue with an env var once I realized that the file was causing issues.

There's a bug causing NSStatusItems in MenuBar<->WindowServer to enter a continuous redraw loop after a number of hours of uptime which pins CPU at like at least 10-20%. I filed it as FB24528844

    1. WindowServer sends the app a stream of remote-context notifications (CGSDatagramReadStream::dispatchMainQueueDatagrams -> remote_context_notify).
    2. AppKit responds by rebuilding the status-bar window's tracking areas and structural regions (_NSTrackingAreaAKManager _updateStructuralRegionCreateIfNeeded / displayCycleUpdateStructuralRegions, including NSButtonCell _hasRolloverAppearance for the menu bar rollover effect).
    3. That dirties the window, so UpdateCycle/stepTransactionFlush commits a CA::Transaction to the WindowServer.
    4. Another notification arrives and the loop repeats at display refresh rate.

Just so you know, a process pinning the CPU at 10-20% on Apple Silicon doesn't even cause any perceptible impact to multitasking. I've pinned the CPU far higher and not noticed anything like this, so it's definitely not that issue. I sometimes forget workloads are even running because the rest of the system feels so perfectly fine even when the fans are running full tilt.

This causes big pauses and stutters system-wide, which is not consistent with any level of CPU utilization alone.

The general quality decline in software seems to be accelerating. I suspect it’s mainly due to AI slop. Engineers creating tons of code due to management pressure and lesser people available to test.

SwiftUI and probably Liquid Glass preceded slop. It's a larger cultural/management issue within Apple.

Honestly it aligns with ideas like the move to Swift. (And the monstrosity of Xcode replacing project builder).

Back when it was obj-c with cocoa the quality was night and day higher than it is today. Not too long ago I booted my G4 and was stunned by how responsive it is, which was extra surprising considering at the time it didn’t feel that way!

You can tell that generations of greybeards at infinite loop have been retiring. They got the hardware culture right only to see the nextstep legacy in software go to waste.

That doesn't really make sense to me, since Objective-C is a terrible language and Swift is a pretty good one. The good parts (mostly the libraries) are still there in Swift.

Swift was the beginning of the end of macOS. It signaled the exit of a ton of NEXT people, and a completely new regime -totally disconnected from what came before- being allowed to run the show.

The quality drop around the time it was introduced was staggering. One example: In the Objective-C days we had extensive, reliable and up-to-date documentation including entire developer guides (book-length PDFs) for all aspects of the OS. These days, besides half-broken frameworks and missing docs, you're lucky if you find out how things work from a WWDC video.

How can one argue against the disaster that is Tahoe? What kind of engineering culture not only produces something this broken but pretends it's OK? Jobs would have fired half the OS division for something half as bad.

but you can fold the iphone now ... o.O

On mine, audio starts to crackle when memory pressure is too high. lol

I get about a second of audio interruptions when theme auto-switches from light to dark at night. Usually no big deal but I need to remember to turn it off if I were to perform with it.

Lol

> The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.

This is not the first time OpenGL got broken and fixed later. This is why software testing exists.

I have my own share of criticisms for Apple, but if we treat every hiccup with doomerism, we will only miss the forest for a single, small bush.

Did they actually catch it in their own tests? Or is this an external developer catching it for them? I guess if it works, it works, but this certainly seems like something they could be testing for up front.

I remember seeing it as an entry in Known Issues list of one or two beta releases. The final releases didn't have the problem.

Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues. I think overall the Apple ecosystem is really good in terms of software quality. However, there are of course issues like with any system and if Apple is not able to reproduce something, the harder it gets to get it fixed.

And the whole premise of your comment doesn't make sense as it's based on a bug in a macOS version that hasn't even been released yet. Of course stuff will break when you're busy developing.

Regularly bugs reported during a beta do not get fixed until the next major release. If they do not, they will be closes as wontfix because they were fine to exist a whole major version.

My macbook has been kernel panicking during every sleep.

Been using macOS since the OS X days of Panther (2003). Since then, people were kicking and screaming about bugs that Apple presumably didn't fix yet, and that's probably true. But it does get fixed, and if you're just sensible - like not upgrading immediately, you'll hardly notice issues. On average, I'm about 6-12 months behind on major versions. I'm in 26.6.2 (Tahoe) right now

I "upgraded" from Tahoe pretty quickly because Tahoe, even a year on, was such a buggy mess that I hoped Golden Gate would be better, especially after it was glazed as a bug fix release. But it just introduced new bugs without fixing the old ones. Staying 6-12 moths behind doesn't leave you with a functional system anymore, it's just differently broken.

What bugs, specifically? I'm not doubting that you're finding bugs, but I am using nearly every part of Tahoe and I haven't found any bugs yet.

Your bug reports to Apple get closed wontfix, really? Everything I’ve read says most peoples’ reports just sit unanswered forever.

> Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues.

Do you have data on that? Based on peopel I talk to, it seems like there are plenty of people on both sides, and it's not clear to me which one is the majority.

The only data most of us can refer to are Google Trends. The unprecedented peaks for "How to switch to Android", "iPhone revert update", "iPhone fix battery", "iPhone slow", "new iOS sucks", "iPhone bad now", "How to block iPhone updates" all reached new peaks with the release of Liquid Glass in late 2025.

Similar story for Macs. It's hard not to see the graph for "macos broken" ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20... ) or "macos slow" ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20... ) or "how to fix macos" ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to... ) and find any reason for this other than people having a surge in bad experiences with Liquid Glass.

Of course, this is only Google Trends, and even if we interpret this as a 4x to 100x increase in bad experiences with Apple products with the forced introduction of Liquid Glass, it still might be the case that >50% of people aren't consciously experiencing problems from it.

Wow those are some pretty crazy graphs. Is Apple customer satisfaction tanking that hard?

I'm not debating whether there are issues. Any sufficiently complex system will have issues, and those having issues will be very vocal about it. But I'm pretty sure it's not worse, or unacceptable.

By and large macOS is extremely stable and robust. Based on my both experience and hundreds of employees using Macs over a 10+ year period. We'd undoubtedly have had more support issues if we had used Windows, as an example.

> I'm not debating whether there are issues

No, you're debating whether "most" users have issues, which was your claim. I don't bother complaining to the IT people at my company because of fundamental issues in the OS that they can't do anything about, so I'm not sure your data implies what you think it does.

We're a small company and we often share technical challenges in a forum. So it's not your typical corporate.

Sad but not surprising. Apple marked their OpenGL subsystem as deprecated all the way back in 2018 with macOS 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12. By some miracle it has kept working all that time. While I hate it that Apple can just up and declare a widely used cross-platform API 'deprecated,' it's their system, not ours. So, we should not expect them to care or lift a finger if they accidentally break it.

When they break stuff, developers should lift their middle finger in response. That they don’t I think reflects some kind of Stockholm syndrome.

And do what? They make money selling products to apple users. They probably already sell to PC if they are interested in it. Not so much stockholm syndrome, but some sort of modern sharecropper development system for sure.

Every once in a while, public opinion actually gets through to them. It only took months to years of clowning and a viral post for them to finally fix their corner inconsistencies.

It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.

It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.

> It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.

The rumor is that Apple decided to put the engineering effort into the M7 series to make a bigger leap.

Engineering resources are finite. Expecting a company to release every version of every chip at every generation is not optimal. Some times it's better to put the development effort into a bigger goal that takes longer.

I wouldn't call that bad. They're being smart about development strategies instead of forcing everything into arbitrary release goals to satsify marketing and shareholders.

That's what I want from companies who development my products. This is a good thing.

Apple's work is cut out for them; M7 and M8 desperately need a better GPU. These SOCs put up fantastically efficient single-core performance, but have some of the worst GPU compute efficiency you can buy. It also needs a better interconnect than RDMA, since Thunderbolt is snail-speed when networking several iGPUs together.

Apple Silicon is a mirror into the Mac's decision paralysis. Apple wants to unify the Mac power users and iPhone casuals onto one silicon backbone, but can't decide who gets the short end of the stick. Tim Cook especially couldn't figure out how to ship a Mac Pro while retaining "ecosystem" level control over academic and prosumer customers. Professionals and researchers had a stack they wanted to use, and Apple didn't support it.

Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals, but he'll need to make software concessions to enter the true ARM HPC market. Ironically, that may entail Apple's rapprochement with Khronos to get the industry onboard with a CUDA stack alternative. Even a basic "inference hardware" GPGPU standard would put Apple Silicon back on the map for professional applications it has otherwise sat-out.

> Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals

The Mac Studio is on par with the best gear out there for similar pricing. What kind of professional are we talking about here?

As long as people keep buying them, devs have no choice but to adapt

Devs always have a choice, but almost always choose to make more money. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head forcing them to develop for macOS.

The other mainstream platform is Windows. Apple only needs to beat Microsoft.

Unless they lower their prices, that will never happen, 17% desktop market share worldwide, with Windows around 76%.

Not everyone lives in countries where Apple prices are acceptable, even for regional developer salaries.

And many do abandon Apple.

How to do that exactly ?

It's more nuanced and the official deprecation status doesn't mean much. sandbox-exec has been deprecated since 2016, but obviously Apple can't afford to break it (Chrome and basically all sandboxing solutions rely on it).

It’s not really “some miracle” as they clearly had some incentive for it to work - it just runs through Metal on the ARM series now. Someone had to spend the time to get that together.

Selling overpriced decides to billions of people and somehow still nobody is available at Apple to spend time on this. No promotions for quality I guess.

In practice the best way to get an OpenGL-ish API is WebGL2. I don’t think Apple would dare to break that.

WebGL2 already has a compatibility layer to make it work on macOS. macOS is stuck on the 2010 vintage OpenGL 4.1 which predates even OpenGL ES 3.x on which WebGL2 is based. They use the ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) from the Android project with a metal based backend.

Which kind of hints towards the fact that they could definitely have supported OpenGL in a way that project like MoltenVK work. The OpenGL standard is frozen in time, last update was in 2017. It's not too late.

The decision not so support modern OpenGL is why so much engineering/3D/CAD/gaming software is suck on the windows platform. There is no true cross-platform graphics standard anymore. WebGPU might be our last hope.

ANGLE is also used by Chrome and Firefox for WebGL2. It includes a translation layer from WebGL2 to Metal.

The decision not to support OpenGL is probably because the API isn’t actually very modern and requires the driver to reconstruct what the user code wants. The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.

> The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.

The only platform where running WebGL on top of Vulkan would make sense is Linux, and on Linux both the GL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape via the MESA project (e.g. there's little incentive to switch from a perfectly fine OpenGL driver to Vulkan for implementing WebGL), especially since the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least).

The same way neither PlayStation nor XBox support it, and Switch does support it, thanks to Android pedigree von Tegra, but the main API with all the goodies is NVN.

In any case, most game studios don't care, because Render-Hardware-Interface (RHI) is a thing since the home computing revolution.

> WebGL2 already has a compatibility layer to make it work on macOS

...and also on Windows (where WebGL runs on top of D3D). AFAIK Linux is the only platform where browsers actually use OpenGL to implement WebGL.

I wonder if someone will step up and implement modern OpenGL versions on top of Metal (iirc something like this already exists for OpenGL ES).

Yes, this is the real continuation of that. I still don't agree with the deprecation, and hope the support will be continued.

Seems like a good time to mention that LunarG’s Vulkan-on-Metal wrapper reached Vulkan 1.4 conformance recently.

https://www.lunarg.com/the-state-of-vulkan-on-apple-oct-2026...

Now we need Mesa’s OpenGL-on-Vulkan to be production-ready when running on KosmicKrisp

https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/zink.html

At the rate compatibility layers seem to come out lately I'd be surprised if we don't quickly end up with a compliant OpenGL-on-Metal implementation soon after Apple decides to stop supporting it fully (or even well before).

I can't imagine what the nested layers of emulation would do to performance. Lol

I think it has the potential to be pretty good, especially on modern hardware. If using DXVK or VKD3D is any indication, I think the performance losses can be minimized. Plus, I've used Zink before on Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver, and it's pretty good.

But why? Why do we need a thousand layers of emulation?

I believe the purpose of Zink is that if someone is writing a new driver for a new GPU, they only need to write a Vulkan driver. After all, OpenGL is a legacy API. Still has lots of uses. But, I think it's better if the effort to write a new driver is spent on bringing up just a Vulkan implementation instead of needing to write two drivers of once.

It's kind of like how Mesa's existing OpenGL drivers all switched to Gallium3D, which splits the Graphics driver into an agnostic front-end and a device-specific backend. Allows for a lot of re-use and optimization. I heard they're wanting to do something the same with their Vulkan drivers for the future as well.

Makes sense

Someone could write an OpenGL layer directly on Metal. There have been a few incomplete starts at that.

Meanwhile, writing an OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer has been a plan for deprecating/simplifying driver support for OpenGL for quite a while now. Might as well focus efforts on that.

Sounds reasonable.

For Vulkan-on-Metal it shouldn't matter much because in the modern 3D APIs most of the expensive work happens upfront in the 'init path' (e.g. when creating objects, not when using them).

OpenGL on a modern API is another issue though because OpenGL is highly dynamic and really isn't a great match for translating to Vulkan, Metal or D3D12 (e.g. changing OpenGL state may involve throwing away and creating underlying Vk, Metal or D3D state objects on the fly, which is expensive).

Interesting

The hits would come from format transformations. When the math gets to the metal, there is little difference.

It's destroying and creating Vulkan objects (which then in turn destroy and create Metal objects) when changing some random GL state (aka "hash-and-cache") which is the critical problem when trying to emulate GL on a modern 3D API.

Modern 3D APIs have moved all expensive operations into the creation of immutable state-group objects, while OpenGL is the opposite (every single state can be changed at any time).

E.g. mapping any modern 3D API to any other modern 3D API is mostly fine since the expensive operations happen outside the hot path, but mapping OpenGL to any modern 3D API is problematic.

Who's behind KosmicKrips/LunarG implementation again? The MoltenVK is taking their time, hence we have a second imeplementation really

The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.

I read the comments before the link and thought this was a bit harsh, but reading that response I now feel the same way you do.

The reporter ALREADY provided a minimal example and Apple is like "yup we're going to keep changing things and you need to keep rerunning the code you sent us and reporting here because we won't bother to run your minimal example ourselves".

Just wow.

Giving the Apple engineer (but not Apple) the benefit of the doubt I guess their policy is not to make any promises or announcements in that channel. They have probably said as much as they are allowed.

Forward looking statements can come from anyone and become sticky when considering security laws. Imagine everyone at Apple was sharing their full triage and timeline for every issue; one can then make informed decisions about their stock price, and investors could sue if those statements turned out to be misleading. At a certain point, the risk is too great.

Ok, but even if that were true , it costs nothing to say "we'll let you know when we think we have fixed the issue so you can then retest"

"Idk lol, it'll probably be fixed one day, keep testing and find out" is a pretty crappy response.

> please keep trying to reproduce this for us

There's an engineer that's used to solely interacting with agents.

You need to get your head out of your bubble and realize that this bug does not move the needle on anything meaningful.

I work at a superscalar and we have also had about 40% increase in breaking bugs in prod year-to-year due to a lot of slop code. However, the engagement and revenue generated is up from the features. Why bother make a timeline and spend time and resources on things that the average user does not care about? Does the average person care about the OpenGL compatibility? No, so why would you spend effort on this instead of for example user engagement? Answer that.

Why make the computer do anything but maximize dopamine and dollars flying out of your wallet? Why ship a calculator app you can't sell subscriptions on, a command line interface, an email suite? Can't make money on it so why do it right? Why let a hammer be a hammer and not let you gamble crypto with it too?

If the customer wants these things and is paying for it, why shouldn't we? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And if your idealism can pay your bills, good for you!

Why even work in tech with that attitude? You are wasting your time on this earth. The margin is better in selling crystal meth and fentanyl, and has a far tighter product market fit.

I dont hold this attitude myself, I actually don't have any of the products I work with because they are kind of exploitative, but its what the people want and most people have very low self-control, mixed with that neoliberalism has convinced them that their path is completely in their hands.

Also it pays me really well so I can take my family and friends on trips and live a nice life :)

Because if you make enough decisions like that in a product that affects consumers and developers, eventually you turn into Adobe. Or worse, this guy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984862

Sure, but it doesn't change the argument. Adobe is doing really well if you look at the revenue. Adobes business is selling to governments and other large corporations that need compliance, its not to cater to the HN developers. Apple is the same, except in their case its the status symbol of having Apple products.

No-one gives a shit if some subset of internet warriors thinks that you will have a downfall in 10 years because of some obscure esoteric corner cases that don't affect your mainline business. Even if they are right you will probably not be around the business at that time and will have made bank.

Engineers and their companies are super users on whom the whole Apple ecosystem depends. If we can’t run our applications on Apple’s operating system, or they break things for our users, we will leave.

Take that lesson back to your company as well. It is easier than ever to switch between clouds and AI providers. It’s easier than ever to replace any software in house. This isn’t an idle threat; I’ve already moved off of several software platforms this year for other providers, and I’m probably doing the same for millions of dollars worth of business every year in the future as well. And my company isn’t immune to it either - our biggest customers are always looking for options to bring software in house. The more we disrupt them with “small bugs”, the more likely they are to leave.

That is just plain false and assigning over-importance to yourself.

Apple's ecosystem depends on every middle-class person around the globe wanting to be able to signal that they have an Apple phone and use the same features as their social group. Engineers are a small subset, they barely move the needle.

Ask the average Apple user if their device experience is getting better or worse over time. Most I know tell me things like they see small bug now where they didnt before, sometimes things dont work as they should, and more things needs a reset or even hard reset to fix. All very generic user reports.

All the bugs users are seeing are things developers picked up on earlier than users did, and shouted about in forums and bug reports. The fact Apple is not listening to its canaries down the coal mine is leading to the general slipping of its reputation.

Apples ecosystem replies on every middle class person around the globe having the frictionless experience Apple is known for. They erode that, and they slowly erode their customer base.

Actually, it seems like the people don't really give a shit, because Apple is still making bank, and is growing year-to-year like never before: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/revenue

In fact, since Covid and LLMs, the ARR has sped up its growth. They should really be eroding under all this shitty software, no?

It’s true and I’m not. If the engineers can’t build software for your OS, your users won’t have software to use.

We’re also talking about MacOS, not iOS. Engineers make up a big segment of MacBook users. Apple is only 9.5% of the personal computing market.

> Apple's ecosystem depends on every middle-class person around the globe

I have terrible news about the distribution of iPhones and the middle class globally.

Right I'm still on 15.5. But random app windows flicker! FLICKER! And it's a brand new 2025 M4 MacBook Air. This is the kind of thing I would expect from like Linux in say 1998?

Slack flickers a lot for me, no idea why. I haven't updated macOS yet because I don't love the look of the new liquid glass stuff. I think this makes me 2 majors behind now...

Was it released for the M4? If so, you might have a hardware problem. Bad display cable, faults on the motherboard, that kind of thing?

No, it's specifically just certain app windows. If it was a hardware failure, we would expect the whole physical display to flicker.

A remote possibility: macOS can switch between different graphic modes, depending on the application, utilizing different hardware and power profiles. At least, it does so on my laptop, and old one with two different graphics "cards", but I don't know if that's your case.

There's a few very annoying audio and Bluetooth bugs on MacOS. I've even installed 3rd party software to hack a fix one of them.

What are the bugs? Which OS and what hardware model?

Random audio crackling in Spotify since macOS 27 on my M1 MBP is one example. I can imagine that's there's a lot of fingerpointing going on though (e.g. whether it's a macOS, Chromium or Spotify client issue). Only thing I know is that it only started with the macOS 27 betas and hadn't been fixed in the final release).

I haven't heard the crackling for a couple of days though, so maybe it has finally been fixed in the latest 27.x beta or a recent Spotify client update, or maybe I'm just on a lucky streak.

Ah. I'm on 15, which is the thread is about

That’s why I bought a Bluetooth Dongle, where everything related to Bluetooth is handeld on the Dongle itself and the PC/Mac only “sees” a USB soundcard (Creative BT-W3X)… it made all my (audio) related Bluetooth bugs disappear on macOS (also on Windows and Linux).

> I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship. Your report is the right channel for the issue.

> As new builds become available, please retest and add the results to FB25133383. If you have access to the macOS 26.7.2 RC or the 27.2 beta, results from those builds belong there too.

Waste your donated time and effort testing against each new build, even though we won’t tell you if we even touched that subsystem between them.

If I were this bug reporter and got a response like that (after making a perfect report including a minimal reproducible test case) I would never donate another free bug report again.

Absolutely crazy that this is the engineers attitude. Not even something like "this has been added to our automated tests and will be tested with each new build". Just straight up asking a volunteer bug reporter to do their testing and reporting for them.

Apple is notoriously secretive about their development timelines and feature releases. This is normal Apple - they’d NEVER disclose that much.

I guess that allows them to avoid pointed questions like "Why hasnt this bug been fixed in forever?"

When that happens, the answer often depends on a cost/benefit analysis - it might just be that it’ll never be fixed. I wouldn’t expect the person answering bug reports to know that in a large company.

Other companies have public bug trackers which assign priorities, tags, tracked comments and even specific devs to certain issues. Hiding internal development is something Apple chooses to do, not the default for a software company.

This is neither of those things. This is a bugfix not a feature and saying “this was fixed in build x, can you please retest and confirm” is not a timeline.

That would be an acknoledgment of a defect though. Apple’s products doesn’t have defects. Ever!

WTH. 15.8.1 is current, 15.8.2 ought to be security fixes only.

Maybe they asked Claude to fix a vulnerability?

Can't have OpenGL security issues without an OpenGL context

OpenGL is a low(ish) level hardware interface, that is almost certainly implemented in legacy unsafe code, so it will be fertile ground for CVEs. Presumably this is a security fix gone wrong

Um, but 15.8.2 isn't released yet. Why is this such a crisis? It's normal to break stuff before you release.

Bitrot in the Apple OpenGL shim or (especially) window system glue really isn't unusual unfortunately.

E.g. the most recent actual bug in the Apple GL shim I stumbled over is that when copying data from the pixel unpack buffer bindpoint, the two ways to provide an offset into the source data are both broken.

I suspect that any feature that's not on the beaten path (e.g. used by a handful legacy but popular GL applications) simply isn't tested, assuming any testing even happens at all.

PS: also personal opinion, and not related to the Apple mess: just let GL go, it's really not a great API to work with (at least not since version 2). Vulkan isn't all that great either, but at least it has slowly started to change into the right direction in the last couple of years, while GL will remain a mess forever since Khronos has dropped the API too - and on Apple devices, Metal is clearly the better (and much nicer to work with) choice compared to both GL and Vulkan.

Fails to reproduce on macOS Version 26.6 (25G70) (but I can't post a reply on the forums because developer.apple.com currently hates me.)

I get the green triangle and `hasDrawable=1 status=0x8cd5 glError=0x0` which is the expected result.

what, there are still regression in the age of AI? or OpenGL is never in regression test suite to begin with?

Tell me this is sarcasm because it's genuinely impossible to tell these days.

Sorry for the confusion. Consider this both.

I honestly don’t think Apple has test automation. So many things have made it out in the past that there’s no way releases have anything close to resembling comprehensive unit or integration level tests.

So they keep breaking previously functioning components even in older OS versions? I thought those were only getting security updates?

Until recently only Windows was the OS where I thought, "how could anyone use that voluntarily?", but Apple has managed to put their OSs right next to that in the same category. After a monotonous decline over more than a decade the final slump only took them three years. They've gotten better at failing faster than before.

I wholeheartedly recommend Linux. Seriously.

XQuartz performance has been broken for a couple of years now and I believe it is primarily due to an OpenGL issue.

Brings back memories of when macOS broke samba, coincidentally the moment I decided to switch off the brand.

I was banging my head against a wall for weeks when that happened, trying to figure out why all my Mac users suddenly couldn't access the shared network drives at work. Mac users being as they are, they defended the macs furiously and spent a week or two pointing fingers at me and my network capabilities.

Oh how I rejoiced when 2 weeks later Apple released a changelog for a small quiet update stating that they had 'fixed' samba connections, even though they had never announced anywhere that they had broken them in the first place. The Macs started connecting to network drives again and all was well, and the mac users all went very quiet for a long while.

I never "upgraded" to macOS 15, but my situation is similar. None of my future computers will be Macs anymore. News like this only prove moving to Linux was the right decision in the nick of time.

You can ask an AI to go through my HN account and see that I used to be an unapologetic Apple fanbitch

Now I must soundly say: Screw Apple.

Momentum and their hardware quality are the only things setting them apart from other platforms, while their ecosystem and individual software products are going to shit.

There's no way to have ourselves heard by them. Their "official" forums are just peer support for users to bang heads against each other.

Ironically, our best hope for computing now is that someone eventually uses AI to make a better OS and ecosystem, like they've started doing with the Adobe and Office clones.

It might not be super healthy to be so emotionally invested in a company, its products, and its doings.

What's the qualifier for "so" (in "so emotionally invested")? Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?

Parent is just passionate about the quality, or decline, of the tools he spend a good chunk of money of, and spends hours each day doing professional work with.

> Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?

The person I responded to self-identified as an "Apple fanbitch". Now they categorically say "Screw Apple."

That seems like a pretty emotional attachment swinging from one extreme to another. Attachment will cause you pain.

And "Apple fanbitch" was just a fun way to say they supported Apple and championed their products. Not a way to describe some emotional disregulation.

And "Screw Apple" sounds like a totally valid consumer sentiment, when the products stop serving you and get more expensive and cocky. Not some blind rage.

It could also be poking fun at themselves. Being conscious about your own perspective/attachments would be healthier and demonstrate more self-awareness than someone who insists they are a cold, robotic fact processor who can't become emotionally invested in their own preferences.

Not having any attachment or inability to feel pain ain't good either.

And it's not a swing: it happens over years. Discontent built up by a thousand small cuts.

Things failing when you need them the most, so often that it makes you reflexively afraid the next time you think about trying it.

To calibrate, we're talking about an OpenGL bug in pre-release software.

Everyone is different and we shouldn't judge them.

I agree with you but buying in to Apple's ecosystem is more than just being emotionally invested in a company. If all of the hardware you bought is going to shit because of what Apple is doing then I think it's fair.

The hardware doesn't change after sale.

The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others. Also ever heard of planned obselense?

And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.

Ever heard of planned obsolescence? The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others.

And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.

And you can't use the hardware without their software.

Oh yeah let's not be emotionally invested in the things you use everyday to do basically everything.

Try walking with a pebble in your shoe or sitting in a crooked chair or sleeping on a lumpy mattress and see how long before you get pissed, O Awakened Unattached Sage

Stop bending over for mediocrity.

...in the things you choose to use everyday to do basically everything

As you see, seeking validation for your anger is not well received when your own culpability goes missing.

> Stop bending over for mediocrity.

That's a false binary choice. You can also shift your purchases to other providers if you think a company is providing a shitty product.

Thats’s nothing compared to all the hava zealots astroturfing this forum though.

I installed Asahi Linux on my Macbook Air recently and while it definitely took more effort than your grandparent would be capable of, it wasn't too bad. Getting FDE working was a pain for sure though.

The overall experience is good, aside from a few big areas: sleep mode still drains battery a ton, like 20-30% a day or more. And battery life in general while using it is pretty bad. And Firefox constantly runs out of memory and crashes.

Hopefully it improves soon. Even despite these issues I'm not going back to MacOS or Apple ecosystem again despite being a big fan of it and user for the last 7 years.

> sleep mode still drains battery a ton, like 20-30% a day or more.

Unfortunately thanks to microsoft banning "suspend", basically that's now normal for most computers. Now the CPU and hardware no longer goes off, just slows down somewhat.

Those are issues with Asahi, but batter life is great on a Framework 13 pro, or anything with the new Panther Lake chipset.

I mean, I pretty much agree with everyone else here that Apple software quality has gone to shit recently but the issues you describe are just awful.

I would not use a laptop with those issues no matter the problems MacOS has currently.

I respect that most people wouldn't and I don't blame them. However the security of my personal information and data, while absolutely nothing interesting or noteworthy, is not a compromise I'm willing to make - mostly for reasons of principle. I don't use this laptop often, maybe at most an hour a day, and I never need it much outside the house. If it was my main driver I'd find another solution.

There is already a better OS.

But there is no Windows Phone anymore unfortunately.

I miss my Lumia 720 more than I miss some family members.

Yeah, just not on the aspects that matter to some of us.

Such as?

Such as the ability to run the commercial software I want to run - for music, video, etc.

Such as the ecosystem being united and not a fragmented mess even worse than Apple's lack of coordination between teams.

Such as first class support, drivers, and control programs, for almost all the hardware I want to own.

> run the commercial software I want to run - for music, video, etc.

Fair, though Wine's coverage is getting pretty good.

> the ecosystem being united and not a fragmented mess

It's a different kind of fragmentation. If your distro is really on top of packing (Nixos or Arch+AUR) this is usually a non-issue.

> Such as first class support, drivers, and control programs, for almost all the hardware I want to own.

Generally not true, Linux is probably the best at supporting hardware right now - if you look at raw coverage. It does have issue with some audio interfaces, and very niche devices. Maybe you have a huge suite of niche devices for some reason (or maybe just FUD), but I doubt you've actually checked.

If you had made this comment in 2020 I would have largely agreed.

Linux? If someone can fix the ecosystem, I'm there.

What's wrong with the ecosystem? Hardware support is robust. Development is done out in the open and miles more professional than the slop Apple or Microsoft are putting out. Desktop environments, distro defaults and documentation are abundant and varied enough to support most user's needs. Besides hostile proprietary closed source software like Adobe or MS Office (of which alternatives are also abundant), what else could you need?

a lot of this stuff is already broken.

XQuartz is almost unusable now since new windows don't get focus.

There are a lot of bugs in xquartz marked "macos bug"

Another issue I had is that rsync was quietly failing for a lot of stuff I backed up.

I used to rsync -av machine:dir/ dir/ and it stopped syncing stuff.

Turns out they silently replaced rsync with a less capable openrsync.

Related positive note. It's wonderful Apple is still looking after macOS 15 users!

I'm insanely grateful to the humans inside Apple who keep macOS 15 patched.

Who cares about opengl or d3d or hell even apis or standards in general at this point.

Apple has a trillion dollars a second to spend on tokens, I'm sure they can manage. Same for the others. Create your own.

It's a release candidate. That's what they are for, to catch bugs. Nothing to see here.

...except the interesting tidbits shared like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142208

I'm on macos 27. why are they still using 15?

Because Liquid Glass is an abomination. I use both 27 and 15 on different computers and Sequoia is just so much nicer to work with.

Yeah, also on v27 that unfortunately has completely messed up mission control. Spaces navigation is now buggy as hell for some reason.

These days you could just ask a bot to port your stuff from OpenGL to a newer API.

Backward compatibility is less of an issue when fixing legacy stuff takes $25 in tokens.

Unfortunately there is no universally supported newer API thanks to Apple.

Minecraft has been moving to Vulkan and using MoltenVK to run the same backend on Mac.

There's some libraries like wgpu that can fill this gap in practice

In that case maybe the answer is $200 in tokens to make a metal OpenGL shim and then share it to the community on GitHub.

Given the comparable performance of OpenGL and Metal on the same hardware I was under the impression that is how Apple had been implementing OpenGL for quite a while.

OpenGL on Apple GPUs is implemented on top of Metal with some private extensions to be closer to OpenGL behaviour. Making things work performantly on top of regular Metal is quite a bit harder.

ANGLE already does that: https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle

Isn't https://github.com/google/angle just that?

Edit: I guess no, Angle is OpenGL ES. My bad.

> Angle is OpenGL ES

In practice this is sufficient for the overwhelming majority of apps. Apple never went past GL 4.1 on the desktop side, and doesn't support most of the interesting desktop-only features (tessellation and geometry shaders, mostly), so ES 3.1 targets desktop macOS fairly cleanly.

Metal is universally supported among Apple's product lines.

Just as useful as DirectX being universally supported in Microsoft's product lines.

The point of OpenGL was to have an API universally supported everywhere

> The point of OpenGL was to have an API universally supported everywhere

That was always more like a dream than reality. OpenGL implementations between GPU vendors and platforms all have significant "implementation defined behaviour", interesting bugs and different performance "hot paths". And as soon as you need to start using extensions, portability is out the window anyway. Even setting up a GL context across different operating systems (e.g. the very first thing every GL application needs to do) is a royal PITA unless bringing in additional helper libraries like GLFW or SDL.

Arguably the only actually portable GL flavour is WebGL.

Which never happened, not even on game consoles.

That's a bad analogy

Everything is universally supported in a small enough universe.

Shouldn't Apple be the one spending the $25 to deliver a product that works?

"Why have X when Y costs $N in tokens" is becoming a tired thought-terminating cliche.

It shouldn't be user's responsibility to have to get their binaries to work at all costs.

Welcome to macOS.

I can port _my_ stuff away from OpenGL, but can't port 3rd party or legacy software that I use.

How about they spend $25 in tokens to fix what they broke?

Why, yes, of course, have all the devs in the world spend $25 and tons of time each, because Apple doesn't care about devs nor users.

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