“This fall, Apple will bring us the latest of its California-themed updates to its desktop operating system with macOS High Sierra. Like any new software release showed off in a carefully rehearsed demo, High Sierra looked promising during its Monday introduction at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference,” Rob Pegoraro writes for Yahoo Finance. “For example, the new Apple File System should speed common desktop tasks like duplicating files or calculating a folder’s size.”
“But there are still some issues Apple didn’t mention during its keynote — lingering problems with the Mac’s core software that we can only hope see attention in the final version of High Sierra,” Pegoraro writes. “The single most maddening part of my Mac experience is discovering that a web page or web pages have caused Safari (or, less often, Chrome) to devour memory and make it impossible to use any other app… That’s pathetic. Apple made pre-emptive multitasking, a process that’s supposed to prevent this kind of problem with Safari, one of the main features of macOS, previously called OS X, when it debuted back in 2000. And Apple knows how to do this. Just look at iOS, where I never have to live in fear that a rogue page has led Safari to clamp its hands around the throat of the operating system.”
“iTunes,” Pegoraro writes. “Oh, iTunes…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Rock solid memory management is atop our list, too.
As for iTunes, good luck. And that goes for everybody from those of us who use it to anyone at Apple tasked with de-bloating it.
Apple has been deliberately (IMHO) ignoring a slew of annoying bugs in macOS 10.12.x. I have a list. Apple has my list too.
Examples:
– 10.12.0 broke alias icons. There was a half-assed patch but full functionality was never restored. Bleh.
– Mail sounds stopped working ~10.12.5. Bleh.
– Font Book can’t show a newly added font. Bleh.
– Intermittent freakishly slow ‘Eject’ of volumes.
– Having to double-click when dropping a bookmark into a Favorites bookmark folder.
– Speech skipping over the initial syllable of everything it says.
– The Mac App Store never came out of beta (IMHO). An embarrassingly unreliable POS Apple should have replaced years ago.
– Antiquated Help system from the last century.
I hope they get back to bothering the small details again. One happy, shiny, smiling star: Apple fixed their Feedback Assistant system, thank you thank you thank you.
Eject or dismount? I don’t have a single one of the “problems” you listed on any of my machines. Oooh and Derek, I don’t have any of “your” problems either 😉
Bro, you are an old, old, old like Dinosaur kinda peep ain’t ya?
Go away, you bore me to death with your self-righteous comments. Go get a G3 man, and chill!
Enjoy your *cough* youthful ignorance. Oh and enjoy the day when you figure out how much you’re revealing about yourself with your *cough* youthfully ignorant comments. Embarrassment is the proper response.
Now back to my enjoying helping others. Or is that concept beyond your comprehension? In which case you might want to peruse this revelatory article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy
“Doesn’t play well with others”
“Go get a G3”. 😆 😆
I’d hold out for a G4 😑
Are you running the betas? I am, and almost every time, the download from the app store is followed by a restart, after which it wants to be installed again. Huh?
Nope. I don’t have that “wants to be installed again” problem.
Well, more stuff wants to be installed. I see exactly the same thing. I can only suspect that something needs to be installed first, then it has to run, thus the restart. At that point apparently the rest of the show is installed.
In the past, we’d have expected the first installation to be a firmware update. But I don’t believe that’s currently the case. So, I don’t know why this is happening.
(I haven’t been enthused as an AppleSeed member due to past grappling with the now repaired reporting tool, Apple taking months to respond to my beta testing reports as well as Apple not responding at all to other reports, probably because they have bigger bugs to squash).
If only a running installation log appeared in the app store window during updates. The lack of such an informative feedback device inspires anxiety and doubt, exactly the opposite effect desired, as detailed in Apple’s old human interface guidelines. I guess that book got shelved in favour of some treatise on minimalism by van der Rohe.
You know art (architecture) much better than I.
You inspired me to go digging around in the System logs. The short answer is that YES, that first reboot was for a firmware update after all. I expect you’ll find the same.
The dull details:
Go in the Console to /var/log/install.log
I did a search for the version number of the latest 10.12.6 beta. (I have not dared install 10.13.0b yet). I.E. “16G12b”.
Below is a dump of my results. Note that they cover a couple sequential days. I believe the first day was the background download of installer elements. The next day I performed the actual installation. Note the first line of the results in particular.
May 31 04:35:06 miniserver softwareupdated[1841]: Remaining packages to install for product 091-15196 : com.apple.pkg.FirmwareUpdate,com.apple.pkg.update.os.10.12.6DeveloperBeta.16G12b,com.apple.update.fullbundleupdate.16G12b,com.apple.pkg.EmbeddedOSFirmware
May 31 04:35:06 miniserver softwareupdate_download_service[89585]: Starting download of 091-15196 for packages (com.apple.pkg.FirmwareUpdate,com.apple.pkg.update.os.10.12.6DeveloperBeta.16G12b,com.apple.update.fullbundleupdate.16G12b,com.apple.pkg.EmbeddedOSFirmware)
Jun 1 07:24:12 miniserver system_installd[1788]: PackageKit: Executing script “preinstall” in /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.Ry4lHV/Scripts/com.apple.pkg.update.os.10.12.6DeveloperBeta.16G12b.VN0oo4
Jun 1 07:24:47 miniserver system_installd[1788]: PackageKit: Executing script “postinstall” in /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.Ry4lHV/Scripts/com.apple.pkg.update.os.10.12.6DeveloperBeta.16G12b.VN0oo4
Jun 1 07:25:06 miniserver system_installd[1788]: PackageKit: Writing system content receipt for com.apple.pkg.update.os.10.12.6DeveloperBeta.16G12b to /
Jun 1 07:25:06 miniserver system_installd[1788]: PackageKit: Writing system content receipt for com.apple.update.fullbundleupdate.16G12b to /
Jun 1 07:26:26 miniserver softwareupdated[1642]: softwareupdated: Starting with build 10.12.6 (16G12b)
Jun 1 07:26:26 miniserver softwareupdated[1642]: SoftwareUpdate: Fire periodic check after upgrade to 10.12.6 (16G12b)
Jun 1 07:43:59 miniserver softwareupdated[1642]: SoftwareUpdate: Fire periodic check after upgrade to 10.12.6 (16G12b)
You are a dear for clearing up my little mystery. Looking at my own logs showed some of the “extra” installs were because the first didn’t conclude – dropped server or network issues. Other “extras” were pre-installing firmware updates, as yours did, or had something to do with compliant device drivers. No wonder Apple likes to hide the devilish details. I will allow my complaint about UI feedback to Apple stand, however – installation should be more verbose, like it is in Windows. Studies have shown that user perception is the greater determinant of satisfaction than is any aspect of reality. For example, displaying an animated progress bar actually slows down processing (obviously) but the user correlates motion with faster passage of time. Truly, the brain is a marvel of deception, and only another brain can outwit it!
Sing it sister. In a word, we are so deceptable. Desceptible? 😉
Someone PLEASE tell me how iTunes is bloated!
This nice article from Tidbits explains the whole deal. It’s seven years old, but still relevant, in the same way that my next-door neighbor was fat, untidy and incoherent two years ago, and still is all of that, despite now wearing dresses instead of overalls.
tidbits.com/article/11615
Google “Apple Core Rot” for just one power user’s grappling with bugs in OS X. Apple’s software has been a steady decline since Snow Leopard.
OS X’s been annoyingly buggy for a long time, one thing after another, ever since Mavericks. But I listened to John Gruber’s podcast after WWDC 17 and there may be hope.. Apple VPs Schiller and Federighi insisted that High Sierra is an overhaul of Sierra in the same way that Snow Leopard was with Leopard. We’ll see.
Running iStat Menus all the time will reveal why I finally, reluctantly gave up Safari as my primary browser and moved to Chrome. It. is. just. a. joke.
I was the only guy in the Mac support field who was still hanging onto Safari while the younger whelps laughed and blazed away with Chrome. Chrome is not perfect, by any means, but when you see Safari, day after day, hour after hour slurping up most of the CPU, slowing the otherwise very fast, all solid state systems I run,…well, I finally caved.
Yes, Apple. You have a fundamental problem with the primary App the people use most on a computer. Can you please solve that before slapping the word “Pro” on everything?
[sigh]
Yes its crazy how much of a memory hog Safari can be. My other wish is to return the coverflow viewing option when attaching files to emails, etc. It was there before, it was great, and now it has been inexplicably gone since Yosemite.
Apple is has not solved the Safari memory hog problem. But they have at least stopped stolen memory from being unavailable to the system again. IOW, there is some eventual ‘garbage collection’ when RAM hogging hits the roof.
I suspect Apple has allowed the Safari RAM hogging as one method of speeding up Safari: Shoving cache into RAM instead of onto the computer drive. But it does require further major refinement.
IMHO Cover Flow was yet another casualty of the juvenile Jony Ive-ification of macOS. Stay away from GUIs Mr. Ive!!!!
It’s a shame, Cover Flow was more useful to me than any number of “features” they’ve shoved into the OS in recent years.
I’m still sore that they broke the poof of smoke animation for the Dock! 😬😤😠😭
Happiness in 10.12.6 beta:
– Apple fixed the missing Mail sounds.
– Apple made progress fixing lost alias icons.
Sadness in 10.12.6 beta:
– Apple hasn’t touched the dysfunctional Font Book app, or unreliable App Store app.
– Apple hasn’t fixed the Safari bug the requires double-clicking when dropping a bookmark into a Favorites folder.
– The Help system is still antiquated.
– Occasional long delayed Eject and Paste linger on.
– Speech still typically skips the start of first words spoken.
There are some sideline worries about the security of Apple’s implementation of SMB seeing as SMB on other platforms has been implicated in system security exploits. We shall see.