My latest aggravation with the company: I upgraded to their newest version of the OS, Catalina, recently, and it looks and performs just fine, except for a couple of gigantic problems. Both Audacity, the great audio processing program, and OBS Studio, the most popular broadcasting software around, crash and die if you try to run them. It’s a conflict with how the OS manages permissions to access things like microphones and cameras. There a couple of ugly workarounds floating around that involve launching the programs from the Unix command line, but still, this is appalling.
Apple should have known about these conflicts long before the OS was released, and if they couldn’t fix them on their side, they should have flown a couple of engineers straight to those companies and helped them fix their code. It’s not as if Apple has a shortage of cash. I can understand how they might find it necessary to move forward, especially on issues that involve security, and break backwards compatibility…but then they are responsible for making the information available to enable apps to conform to the new standards.
Oh, yeah, and the camera software for my microscope is also broken. That’s a very narrow niche so I don’t expect a huge effort by Apple to make it work, but still, I’m sitting here feeling like my computer has been crippled in some of the functions I use most.
Dreamweaver (website editing program) broke, too, but it almost seems to be Adobe’s business model to allow it’s software to be broken by Apple, then hit you up for an upgrade. Now, they have a subscription model which simply doesn’t make any sense for a less-than-casual user of that software. I think the Universe is telling me that a website started with Notepad in 1997 and converted through 4-5 web editing packages over the years is time to retire!
The software that runs my Eye-TV box got caught up in the total conversion to 64 bit software with Catalina. The developer has a beta version in open testing. All developers have known this transition was coming for years. Mojave kept displaying notices of 32 bit software would not run under Catalina.
I looked at the age of my old iMac, and decided to freeze it at Mojave to be able to run mission critical 32 bit software, and got a new iMac to be my main computer which runs Catalina and beyond.
“Oh, yeah, and the camera software for my microscope is also broken. That’s a very narrow niche so I don’t expect a huge effort by Apple to make it work, but still, I’m sitting here feeling like my computer has been crippled in some of the functions I use most.”
It’s not Apple’s job to make 3rd party sofware work.
Just be grateful you’re not dealing with instrument sofware running under windows. “Oh you want to upgrade the software for your $50,000 HPLC to run under Windows 10? That’ll be $10,000 please…”
We have a stack of very old computers laying about JUST to make sure we have spares to keep faculty member’s instruments that require Windows XP (often very specific versions of Windows XP ) running.
Another fun fact: If you roll back your computer to Mojave via Time Machine (you DO have Time Machine running?) Time Machine got broken, because Apple changed some of it under the hood, so if you roll it back, you have to reformat your Time Machine volume (or start with a fresh drive).
So far I’ve only updated one test system to Catalina; I only just recenly updated my main work computer to Mojave, and am in no huge hurry to update it.
Ideally 3rd party software makers stay connected with platform OS development and offer immediate updates already beta-tested after major OS updates.
The 32 to 64 thing happened with iOS several years ago, leaving my iPhone 5 in the dust. Several apps were left behind.
The recent iOS13 update raised holy hell with a browser, which I stopped using since it has yet to be updated. Guess developer didn’t care. There were some other quirks, like touch screen sensitivity launching links by scrolling in apps and in the iPhone’s own settings menus, but all have been resolved.
Most apps I use are free, which may make me the product, though Apple is a bit stricter on app standards, I assume, than Android.
I have several Linux desktop boxes sitting neglected because I no longer care. My next project, on backburner, was a safer router than consumer grade crap. pfSense was the idea, but I’d have to figure out separate wireless AP, especially a safer platform and firmware (flashed but not bricked openwrt?) and lost interest. Maybe in the future. Following a routersecurity website made me even more disgusted with tech corporations than I could get with Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Routerland and iOT are the wild west (to the extent that was a thing and not a mythos beyond the movies).
They’ve successully driven me away. I’ve never so much as turned on another kind of computer, the only devices I’ve ever use have been Apple. But, the deterioration of quality in both the software and the hardware is too much, and I’ll never buy an Apple device again. The oldest devices I have now are 2011, and I still run many of the older OS’s, as you have to go that far back to get the quality of hardware and software that they used to have.
#3 It’s not Apple’s job to make 3rd party software work.
It depends why its broken. Apple seems to be be moving things around for the sake of moving them around – or more likely so it can fleece both customer and software provider. I’ve been in IT since before PCs and Apple have got to be the most painful people to work with. They stopped providing a service for their customers many years ago.
Smart enough to understand a significant portion of the Cosmos, yet so stupid as to cave in to profitability.
Go Humans!
Also related: I recently looked up the latest Powerbook models, because my current machine is getting rather long in the tooth at 6 years of age (but still working, so I’m not in crisis mode here). They’re replacing all the Thunderbolt 2 ports with Thunderbolt 3, and there is no standard USB port anywhere. This is horrifying. If I get a new laptop someday, I’ll have to replace all the cables and adapters I’ve got, and also get a Thunderbolt to USB adapter so I can use all this other gear I have right now.
Jesus, Apple. Just switch to USB everywhere, like all the other PCs out there, so I can use 3rd party equipment without also having to buy an apple-branded adapter. Cheap assholes.
Of course, if they break all of my extant software, I’ll have no reason to stay in the Apple camp at all. That’s the main thing keeping me here now…not the hardware, but my investment in software.
I have long been baffled as to why Steve Jobs became so enamoured of Unix when he started NeXT. Unix is so fundamentally removed from the whole Apple notion of the intuitive user interface.
One might think that today Apple would have the resources to build a modern, multi-tasking operating system of its own.
One clarification: recent Apple laptops do have standard USB ports. It’s a USB-C connector rather than USB-A, but it’s still USB:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
If you have cables that have USB-A connectors, you don’t need to buy the adapters from Apple, and they’re pretty cheap:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb-c+usb-a+adapter&crid=2ZXCLFCT30TU4&sprefix=USB-C+USB-A%2Caps%2C196&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_11
You won’t need Thunderbolt/USB adapters to use your existing USB peripherals, just USB-A/USB-C adapters. The ports can do both Thunderbolt 3 and USB. It’s just a connector change, not a proprietary port (other PC manufacturers also use USB-C).
I work for a very large computer company where most of the software engineers have Macbook Pros. So many people reported problems with Catalina that I am simply not upgrading from Mojave until I have to, Some of the problems people have reported still don’t have good workarounds. I haven’t upgraded my personal iPhone to iOS 13, either. Too many reported problems.
Both Audacity and OBS Studio run on Linux-based systems, too. No idea about your microscope-camera software. Maybe you could jump into the un-American cesspool of FLOSS?
I use apple computers for audio/video work and pretty much every DAW and plug in maker sent emails saying don’t upgrade to Catalina until they figure out how to work with it. Apple isn’t much interested in third party software working with their computers and for a good stretch they didn’t really care to much about professional users, at least not in my field. Final Cut Pro was gutted and useless for a long time. Logic seems like good software but old timers like haven’t switched over as much as we could, maybe should have. Sorry to hear nothing is working. I know I am one update away from having to replace tons and tons of older apps I use on a daily basis.
This is exactly what drove me from Apple to Linux about 5 years ago, after being driven away from MS 10 years ago. There are many frustrations to using Linux but it has never tried to make my life difficult just so it could extort more cash from me. MS is blatant about it. They repeatedly changed the format of Office files for the sole purpose of making old software incompatible with newer file formats thereby forcing users to upgrade the Office Suite if they want to read files from other users even though the suite was working fine for them. Apple doesn’t do that. Most upgrades are free once you’ve bought the program which removes that incentive. What Apple does instead is repeatedly make life difficult for 3rd party vendors by breaking functionality, thus driving frustrated users to Apple software. This is particularly tough on smaller vendors or FOSS vendors like Audacity.
brucej@3–
Apple definitely has a responsibility to make 3rd party software work. It’s not an absolute responsibility — I don’t expect Apple to pay to debug 3rd party software — but they have a direct financial responsibility to their customers and the 3rd party vendors who sell through the Apple Store. Even the products that are not sold through Apple are still helpful because they expand their ecosystem, making an Apple computer a better purchase. All of these vendors are helping Apple and Apple is returning the favour by acting like a particularly awful feudal lord. ‘As of today, you may not use the baron’s roads to bring grain to market unless your wagon is fitted with genuine Baronmobile wheels, which will be made available to the public only a few months after harvest. But you still owe tithes!’
I would also note that Mac OS upgrades rarely break core Apple software, which means they make damn sure their own products work before upgrading but they don’t give 3rd party vendors the same privilege. This is clearly anti-competitive.
Finally, just because 3rd party vendors on the MS platform can be even more extortionate doesn’t excuse Apple’s behaviour.
Re: mailliw @ #10…
Unix doesn’t actually have a “user interface”. You connect with a terminal. If you want a GUI, you do the sensible thing and run a graphical processing program (mostly it’s been Xwindows, but there’s new stuff coming along now) and then whatever GUI you happen to like. The same is true of Linux.
If you want an inexpensive example to play with, get a Raspberry Pi, install Raspbian, and then try out as many different GUIs as you care to.
This is all something unix/Linux got right. The user interface has no business being embedded in the OS.
For those talking about Audacity… I check (apt-cache search) and it’s in the Raspbian Buster repositories. Raspberry Pis are a heck of lot cheaper than anything Apple sells.
PZ, I don’t know about Powerbooks (I thought they didn’t make those anymore, do you mean MacBooks?), but all the Mac laptops now have all the components soldered to the frame, making upgrading and repair next to impossible.
So, if your hard drive breaks, you can’t buy a new one and have it put in. You have to buy a new laptop. If you want to buy and install a larger hard drive, you can’t: you have to buy a new computer with that size of hard drive already in it.
Same with the RAM. The chips are soldered in, so you cannot add new ones to upgrade the memory, you have to use the amount of RAM that was originally in the computer forever.
And, if, say, the controller (or whatever it’s called) that works the SMC breaks and needs replacement, the SMC has firmware on it that self-erases when you try to replace the controller that works it. It basically commits suicide so that you can’t have that repaired, and have to buy a whole new computer.
All this is for no reason at all except as a power play to make customers throw away their entire computers and have to buy a new one, just when a minor component goes down, or if they want to upgrade its components. Apple started this in, I believe, 2012, so any laptop after that is not really repairable or at all upgradeable.
As I said, I own no Mac hardware that’s older than 2011. The 2010 or 2011 models originally came with 4 GB of RAM: that was easy to have upgraded to my current 16 GB. I believe they were sold with 500 GB hard drives, but when one of mine broke, I just had it replaced with a 1 TB drive. That sort of use is no longer possible. You want an ungrade or a minor repair, you have to throw your computer away and get a new one. Not hardware that I’ll ever buy.
chrislawson,
Apparently not. :)
Clearly, providing backward compatibility between versions is both harder and less profitable.
—
PS
That’s with the proprietary DOC format, which is basically a dump of the application’s internal representation of the document, not just the document content and metadata, and the default setting.
MS Word could save to RTF from the start IIRC. Still can. Or XML or whatever.
Go figure.
Oops, apparently RTF is also proprietary. Bah.
Well, Apple is the worst out there, except for all the others
@#10, mailliw:
For a certain type of software developer (including me), the fact the macOS is close to linux really makes an important difference in choice of system. I use macOS both for work (where I do a lot of work with AWS instances running linux) and the hobby project (webapp programming using python also running on a linux host). Our corporate IT gives us the choice of macOS or Windows. The choice is clear – it is far easier to get a development environment going with macOS than Windows due to having a close-to-linux command line with homebrew to fill in the gaps.
There’s a reason I’m still on High Sierra and refusing to upgrade. Every time I upgrade something I need breaks. Even the stuff that doesn’t break usually needs a multi-hour re-compile.
Too much hassle to upgrade.
@#10,mailliw
Two reasons:
1. At that time the Mac OS was basically a quivering mass of duct tape and spit which was terribly unstable. It could only run one real program at a time (“desk accessories” were not real programs), they were using the upper byte of memory addresses for data, program crashes were nearly automatically system crashes, and programs could overwrite OS memory. (And the latter two problems never really went away in the “Classic” Mac OS.)
2. Jobs got kicked out of Apple, and he wasn’t a gracious person so he presumably felt just a bit bitter about it. Going with a technologically superior back-end let him legitimately sneer at the Mac, although it did mean that NeXT computers had to be much more expensive than Macs to produce. (They stuck with Motorola CPUs at the time, but couldn’t use the cheaper 68000 or 68020 because neither one came with a standard MMU.)
There’s history there, unfortunately. Apple tried to partner with IBM to build a “modern” OS, back in the 90s. It really didn’t end well, for either of them. Then, while they were trying to write a “modern” (i.e. protected-memory and preemptive multitasking) version of System 7, their own toxic management practices got in the way while Jean-Louis Gassée was hiring away as many Apple programmers as he could to start Be. (And it has been stated by multiple sources that his plan was always to build an OS which would be basically Mac OS 8 with different icons and windows, and then blackmail Apple into buying Be so they could re-skin it. And he would have gotten away with it if he hadn’t gotten so greedy and repeatedly raised his price during negotiations to the point that it was cheaper for Apple to buy NeXT instead. And since nobody wanted a Mac-like OS but Apple, and Be’s hardware never really caught on, that was pretty much the end of him.) Apple’s internal efforts failed, and they floundered for a while. Gil Amelio was brought in to fix things, made a lot of sensible decisions, and eventually brought Jobs back in and the company recovered, but had committed to use NeXT OS underpinnings.
And yes, the hybrid Mac-NeXT GUI is inferior to both. The Dock in particular manages to combine elements of both and to do every single task that it does far worse than either the equivalent mechanisms in the Classic Mac OS or NeXTStep/Openstep. In the words of a certain colorful blog I’m about to reference, “they crossed a black male horse with a white male horse and ended up with a double-ssed zebra that keeps shtting itself”.
@#17, whheydt
That is a user interface. Specifically, a “command-line interface”.
And Mac OS X has that, too, if you really want it. Most people not only don’t, but actively want to not deal with it. (And no wonder: the POSIX standard basically consists of enforcing compatibility with the original UNIX, which was written by a couple of college students who apparently did a lot of drinking.)
Most people would disagree with you completely. The fact that there is no standard GUI in Linux/Unix is a terrible hassle. Writing programs becomes needlessly more difficult, troubleshooting becomes — for the normal user — basically impossible.
If your OS requires the user to go to the command line? Your OS is a failure. When PZ says there are workarounds but they require the terminal? That means that the level of performance you are recommending is so unacceptable that PZ is considering uprooting everything and rolling back the OS, and maybe even jumping ship entirely, because some of his user experience is as bad as Linux routinely is.
It’s a pity that the old Linux-Hater’s Blog is apparently gone because foul-mouthed as it was it had some really concise criticisms of the whole open-source world. In particular, the post titled “The Fallacy of Choice” is directly applicable here: most users don’t care about a choice between broken (or otherwise hard-to-use) options, they much prefer a single working baseline, even if it means they have no meaningful choice.
I use Audacity now and then. It’s open source, so it’s maintained by volunteers. That means that when the OS changes and breaks something, it usually takes a few months before one of the volunteer maintainers fixes it. That’s what happened in the move from 32 to 64 bit for Mojave.
Apple didn’t break Audacity just to have something to do on a slow Monday. Apple has been tightening security and moving to a capabilities oriented framework. They’re tightening the screws on the microphone and audio output. For a long time, any program that could run on your machine could do anything it wanted. It could install system software. It could connect to the any website it chose. It could get your location and hardware details, upload your contact list to Estonia, turn on your camera and microphone, and so on, all without you having a clue.
Sure, a perfect system would never allow a piece of unauthorized code to execute, and having perfect users would mean no one ever getting tricked by a phishing attack. Since neither systems nor users are perfect, modern computers need what they call defense in depth. If some code does manage to execute or the user does get tricked into revealing a password, it would be nice to be able to limit the damage. This means that good programs now have to work harder and ask the user nicely for all sorts of permissions, like in a digital game of Simon says requiring “may I” after “may I”.
Meanwhile, stuff breaks and doesn’t get fixed for a while or maybe it never gets fixed. Think of it as a transient immune system problem, like a low grade fever or sore arm after getting a vaccine. It’s not pleasant in the short run, but in the long run, the immune system upgrade is an overall win.
@17 whheydt
Sometimes Unix/Linux enthusiasts remind me of the Christian evangelists who come to the door and ask me if I have heard about Jesus. As I went to a Christian school where we had a religious service everyday, I generally find that I know more about Jesus than they do.
Likewise having worked with (rather than played with) some of the expensive examples of Unix like HP-UX and AIX (not to mention free Unices like BSD and Linux) I think I am in a reasonable position to judge the OS’s strengths and weaknesses.
On the whole I see the success of Unix/Linux as a Qwerty effect rather than the result of the operating system’s technical qualities, it was (comparatively) cheap and a bit portable, it’s now free and a bit more portable.
As @25 The Vicar mentions the command line is the user Interface in Unix/Linux. Presumably an operating System without a user Interface would involve programming at machine code level.
It is perhaps worth remembering that operating systems without a command line existed before Apple. Not GUI but without a command line.
The Unix Haters’ Handbook is an entertaining read, written by scientific programmers who were naturally unhappy about having their beautiful, elegant, advanced Apollo and Symbolics workstations replaced with cheap and nasty Sun products https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf. The new foreward by Donald Norman is a welcome Addition, replacing the unsurprisely somewhat sour original foreward by Dennis Ritchie.
Surely the open source community can do better than Linux?
Last I heard, the iPhone/iPad crew were the Official (ahem) BSDs at Apple, and everybody else has to tug forelocks and get out of their way when they come swaggering down the hall: partly a result of the toxic competitive compartmentalized corporate culture fostered by S. Jobs, partly due to general California chronic status-climbing one-up-manship culture, high-school cliquery writ large.
This generates lots of unnecessary stress for the majority of Apple workers, of course, and harms quality of products and services across the board. I feel a bit surprised, on reflection, not to have heard of overloaded-employee-snaps violence in Cupertino – but considering their legendary ferociously enforced code of silence and secrecy, now I wonder…
Apple don’t operate like most companies. They have a very specific target audience. They write their use case stories for those people and those people alone. If you don’t fit into their niche, you’ll have a hard time with them.
This is why I can’t use apple. Not because I don’t like them, but I’m not at all the kind of person they think about. I realised this when all my attempts to sync my iPod to my Linux box failed because they were considered attacks and apple kept “closing the doors”. I bought hardware from them, I liked it, all I wanted to do was sync the podcasts from the computer to the iPod. But because I use Linux, and their stories don’t include the kind of person who uses linux, I was not only left cold, but actively worked against by apple themselves.
PZ, the problem is you’re using 3rd party software. And open source software at that. That’s like a nerd thing to do. You need to use fully supported apple software to do the things you do like a good little citizen. That’s all that they consider when they make these changes.
Microsoft has always been a lot better with this. Their backwards compatibility has been pretty astounding from my point of view. Linux isn’t all that great with it, but compensates by having all the apps get released with updates all the time.
Some history is in order.
First of all, Unix took over because at the time, it was the only OS that wasn’t tied to a particular vendor’s hardware. AT&T licensed it (with source!) to pretty much anyone, and they didn’t charge much (if anything) to academic users. So if you developed some new hardware and didn’t want to have to write your own OS, then Unix was the only option; all you had to do was to modify the few hardware-dependent parts. Plus, you got all the software that other users had developed to get their work done, e.g., networking software, compilers, etc.
There were lots of other OSs out there, and I’m told that some were better than Unix, but then you were tied to a particular vendor’s hardware and to the capabilities that the computer vendor decided to provide for you. With Unix, if you went for different hardware, you could fairly easily port your stuff to the new system. And if the flavor of Unix you got didn’t have some feature you needed, you had the source code and could modify it.
That’s because the only input devices available at the time were serial devices. Mostly ASR-33 teletypes, which were electro-mechanical typewriter-like device. The alternatives were (punched) paper tape and punch cards.
The “command line interface” was considered by many to be a step up. In those days, if you used IBM, you handed a stack of punch cards to someone who ran it through a punch card reader, and instead of “commands”, you had a bunch of cards with “Job Control Language” in front.
Unix does not require anybody to go to a command line. The command line interface is a user-level program (a “shell”), just like the GUI is.
The reason people “go to a command line” is that command lines are a lot more flexible. GUIs will only allow you to do the things that the person who designed the GUI intended for you to do. If what you want to do is always what the GUI writer anticipated, then it’s fine. But if you want to do something different, the GUI is no use to you. I have seen GUIs that were more open-ended, and it always amounted to typing in some sort of script, i.e., a list of statements and commands. Which is exactly what a Unix “shell” does.
@30 Allison
The success of Unix is down to historical circumstances rather than technical superiority, much like the QWERTY keyboard layout.
The teletype may have been an advance on punch cards but many of us were raised on 70s and 80s vintage minicomputer Systems with terminal based input so this “advantage” wasn’t apparent to us. We were subjected to huge hype about how great Unix was, though my first reaction to seeing it was to think that it was some kind of bizarre practical joke rather than an operating system.
The correct attitude to Unix/Linux is still, I think, bemused shoulder shrugging acceptance rather than enthusiasm.
This happens every time there’s an OS update to pro media developers. Audio or video something breaks in service to security.
I understand why they break it – it’s usually a particularly nasty vulnerability they’re trying to close with such a major overhaul – but it is nonetheless a pain in the ass.
Developers are usually given fairly substantial heads-up times on changes, but nevertheless small shops often lag behind since they’re usually one or two folks writing code on the weekends.
Only about half of my audio apps are catalina-ready.
This is why most music and video producers have a firm “no updates for at least six months” rule.
I think it’s important to realize (this has been mentioned, but perhaps not stressed enough), that Apple gives a lot of help to all developers, including:
long term deprecation warnings
tools that flag incorrect or deprecated use of APIs
access to pre-release versions of system software months in advance (typically early June for a release in late September)
long term warning of major changes (eg dropping support for 32 bit software. This one has been on the wall for years. Audio software developers in particular, have no excuse).
MacApp Store diagnostics and reviews, which have also other purposes of course.
access to engineering resources, either with Tech Support incidents (not free, 2 incidents per year included in the developer program), and access to Apple Engineers in labs at some points in time (eg the WWDC)
As a developer myself, I have witnessed time and time again “product managers” refusing engineering time for code health reasons, forcing the accumulation of technical debt, and leading to decreasing quality in software and refactoring done when there is no choice and no time, leading to weeks or months of wait time imposed on users while the software is brought up to documented standards.
Next on the wall: In November 2020, Push Notification Servers will stop accepting the HTTP 1.1 protocol from notification sources. Apple has communicated to that effect, explaining how developers must switch to the more modern, more efficient HTTP 2 protocol. My prediction: in November 2020, suddenly many apps will stop receiving their push notifications, and the usual people will blame it on Apple, instead on developers.