Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers. What does it bring to the table besides headaches?
It’s... fine? Honestly I’ve upgraded on day 1 on every OSX release since lion, the only complaint I really have about High Sierra is that it doesn’t really change anything. I can’t even name one thing off the top of my head that changed since Sierra, and I use almost every built-in app (Mail, iTunes, Calendar, Safari, Terminal.)
Safari has some new things (global and per-site reader view, disabling autoplay, privacy enhancements) but that doesn’t really count since it also works on Sierra.
I honestly don’t see what all the complaints are about, but I might just be lucky.
You might, I have a mac mini that has run fine since day one of the high sierra update. However, my rMBP has had several freezes (at least once a month) and a few graphical glitches (had to do a hard reboot after every instance).
Both were updated at the same time. I keep my work laptop (another rMBP) on Sierra and I might just skip updating that one altogether.
Well, I also have occasional freezes (also probably once a month, typically it's when resuming from sleep) on my MBP but no more so than I had in Sierra and all the releases before. My iMac (5k) has been pretty much 100% reliable though, so I attribute most of this to the MBP hardware.
I'm not saying 10.13 has been perfectly reliable, but it doesn't seem less reliable than previous versions to me.
> It’s... fine? ... the only complaint I really have about High Sierra is that it doesn’t really change anything.
I'm running 10.13.2 on a 2014 MBP, and can say the same -- as praise, not complaint. I want my desktop OS not to break stuff more than I want it to add new features, and 10.13 mostly succeeds in not annoying me by breaking stuff.
I usually wait a few weeks, but had to upgrade this time for the XCode update and News Preview sim plugin and I had the same experience—even on both an 13" 2013 MBP and 15" 2015 MBP. No problems, but no noticeable changes, really. Except for the font... I use Notes as well and I guess I like the new features, but I hope it doesn't go much further.
Have to agree, my biggest concern for putting it off was APFS so I waited until no one complained about it for long enough thinking 'everything else should still be ok' - big mistake. Stay away until Schiller praises the 'stability' release at 2018 Developer Conference.
I think it’s APFS that’s the cause of my biggest frustration, but I’ve not seen anyone else complain about. I normally run with about 50gb free space. After three to four days, I’m normally down to about 3gb and nothing will get it to show back up, other than a reboot.
I’ve even run a test which supports this - downloaded 35gb of files, deleted them and emptied the trash. Same thing... space is missing till I reboot.
Yes, this is likely the reason: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015, and maybe (due to bug or by design) these snapshots are enabled always, even if backup partition is not configured.
> In macOS High Sierra, Time Machine stores snapshots on every APFS-formatted, all-flash storage device in your Mac or directly connected to your Mac.
time machine local backups cannot be disabled anymore (was possible in sierra). these backups are going to a hidden volume and can be listed with the tmutil(8) command. it is not possible to delete all local snapshots with a single command either, the delete subcommand takes a single date...
for this reason i do only on-demand backups when i connect my external backup drive.
another worrying thing is that the time machine backup drives still use HFS+ because APFS does not support directory hard links. so now i am backing up APFS files to HFS+ "bit perfectly".
my worry is backing up from FS A to FS B where these file systems are not feature equal. just the fact that you cannot use APFS to backup APFS is worrying to me.
I converted main partition on hard disk to APFS and now it's very slow. I know I shouldn't use it on hard disks, but installer (which updates 10.12 to 10.13) crashed otherwise, leaving system unbootable (booting to installer again). After converting root partition to APFS installer was able to complete installation.
Not sure, however, that APFS is the reason of slowdown, maybe other filesystems are slow too in this version. FS cache, however, still works, and after warmup system becomes fairly responsive (on 16 Gb of RAM).
I had an issue with “purgable” space on a non-APFS system preventing me from creating a Bootcamp partition. Probably not what you describe but thought it was worth a mention. Followed this guide to “fix” it: https://www.jackenhack.com/mac-os-purgeable-remove-clear-spa.... Wasn’t best impressed.
the 'missing space' has hit me a few times over the years, but the highsierra/apfs made it worse. it will often slowly reclaim the space. I've deleted a multigig file, and, say, 30-40 minutes later, the space shows as 'available'. 2016 apple refurb SSD (2015 mbp model). It's all their own hardware and software, and it's buggy (or now designed to be confusing re: disk space).
They totally have f...ed up the free space indicators. It used it be that when I deleted things the indicator reflected it exactly. Now my indicator goes from 150 to 220 GB up and down for no apparent reason. I really have no idea how much free space I have exactly.
Use lsof to look for deleted files which are still open. I’ve debugged that problem with third-party software (AV, backups) a few times over the years.
Apple has really been eroding their geek cred with their latest OS releases. It's going to take some time to build that goodwill again, and so far they've acted like nothing is wrong.
You probably already know just how excited I was to hear they will combine Mac OS and IOS into one OS. I can't wait for all the new bu..err.. features we'll be getting!!
\s
How's Linux doing with battery life on a laptop these days? I think my 2014 MacBook may be my last.
The new rMBP is about five hours if you don't touch it at all. under 4 hours if used for working. It is a step down from my previous 2012 model which is a damn shame.
Sure I can. I generally have the screen turned down quite low regardless and if I know I’m going to be without power I’ll close unnecessary programs, but I can do a bunch of web development with Sublime and a browser going for a full 7-8 hours.
I'm in the same boat. Quite scared of the seemingly endless stream of bad news. Switched to macos about 6 years ago, but it seems to have been a downhill ride.
So sorry, my experience with Apple from 2004 until Sierra was totally positive - hardware and software. I'm sure Apple will be rectifying this 'dropped ball' moment soon and I pray they'll learn from it.
Taking a wild guess here, the issue sounds like a GPU hang or crash. This gives the illusion of total unresponsiveness when only the display is not updated anymore. It would be interesting to see if networking still works in that frozen state. The CPU seems to be unaffected from the looks of it (sound decoding and playback works).
Agreed — and be rather unsurprising given the patchy nature of video driver quality. It'd be really easy to believe that Metal 2 is putting more pressure on a previously less used code-path and is flushing out bugs or hardware issues.
My company is in the position of having to upgrade soon, because of the abysmally broken SMB stack on everything since Mavericks. It's fine when you are doing SMB between Macs. But against Windows servers with decent sized directories (upwards of 10K folders), it's a nightmare. Unbearably slow, beachball city, missing files and folders that show up just fine on Windows.
We use Acronis Connect (formerly ExtremeZIP) for AFP connectivity at present, but that only helps with the missing files problem. It's still painfully slow.
SMB on 10.13.2 is blazingly fast, almost as fast as Windows, and the missing files/folders problem is gone.
I upgraded my iMac, zero problems so far (though admittedly this uses a fusion drive so no AFPS).
As for reasons to upgrade, there's nothing particularly exciting, but things are just a little better. A lot of nice stuff in Safari, though at least most of it is available in Sierra as well, and I'm not actually sure offhand what (if any) requires High Sierra. HIEF support for photos so they take less space. Also better editing of photos in Photos, including the ability to muck about with live photos (e.g. looping them, bouncing them, etc), which is fun. Notes has some good stuff, such as tables, pinned notes, and sharing with other people (which I've made heavy use of lately). And so on.
Exactly. Sierra was bad enough requiring a bunch of expensive software upgrades (vmware). There hasn't been any difference in os x in years. My MacBook Pro never slept properly and needs to be hard booted in all of the four past os x releases so there's no need to upgrade even to get the bugs. I wonder if I'll ever own a laptop that sleeps properly, but at this point I doubt that just like I doubt anyone can write a proper file system sync between host and guest vms. I guess some things are just impossible to solve yet, but I'm sure ai will solve all of this in two weeks once it takes over, except Apple's quality problems which seem intractable. /s
I had the same problem. After years of Windows laptops, I bought a Macbook back in 2015 because I wanted a change. Ended up with the same problem. Tried all sorts of fixes. Reinstalled the OS several times. It would work for a day after the reinstall and then lock up after every sleep again. I guess it wasn't always a complete lock up. Once when I was beyond frustrated with it, I let it just sit. After 30 minutes, it came back on.
I returned it and went with a Thinkpad instead. On all my Windows laptops, sleep's never been a problem. Even on the cheap machines.
Never has. To be clear, it sleeps, just never wakes up sometimes. It's actually quite often that this happens. Often it won't even wake up after opening the lid and tapping on its internal keys, so it's not just a USB issue. I'm not running anything unusual. Jetbrains IDEs, Chromium, iTerm2, vmware fusion, slack, sublime, etc. This is an ongoing issue for 4 OS X versions since I bought the laptop.
I've just given up on having a computer sleep and wake up properly, especially a laptop, like I've given up on ever seeing reliable bluetooth on the same laptop (can't even play when the speaker is literally touching the laptop without dropouts; phone has no problems). I assume that laptops with reliable sleep is something we might see again in 2020 and beyond (2007 mbpro had it). On the other hand, I know for a fact I will not see reliable bluetooth connections in my lifetime or maybe ever, so compared to that, there's still hope.
The appeal of Metal 2 and APFS are both pretty big. I waited until 10.13.2 for all the concerns about security and performance issues, but finally made the jump. I am on a mid 2014 MBP and have had no noticeable issues. Most of the people for whom it works aren't posting to Twitter or HN saying "ZOMG everyone! My mac worked fine today. Just like it has been for the last 3+ years."
My upgrade went fine, but my wife's upgrade hosed her hard-drive, and we had to wipe and start over, installing from a thumbdrive. We both have late 2013 MBPr's. The apple support person was really nice, but failed miserably to help us even build the bootable drive (they didn't understand how to use Disk Utility to create a GUID partition, or how to use Terminal to install the OS)
APFS. That's the big addition. I've had a few horrific problems with High Sierra, two of them leading me to do full disk wipes. My current problem is this odd occasional screen scrambling bug, that happens for a split second a couple times a day. Could it be related to the random colors that show up sometimes when I wake my MBP from sleep? I have no idea.
If you believe the bringers of bad news you clearly haven’t been using Apple products for long as the doomsayers alway love to trash their latest products.
The next iPhone is always going to be the one that ends Apple, the new OS always shows that Apple finally lost its way.
You’re better off ignoring that drivel and making up your own mind.
I upgraded to high sierra a couple days ago and my MacBook has been freezing AT LEAST once a day. Good on you that you’ve avoided the upgrade, I wish I had too.
