Tested: Apple's patch fixes the thermal slowdowns in the 2018 i9 MacBook Pro

124

Comments

  • Reply 61 of 98
    GeorgeBMacgeorgebmac Posts: 11,421member
    No matter how you cut this, it was sloppy.

    Combined with how Macs have both become niche products and consistently fallen behind current technology, I have to assume that Apple is looking at making some upgrades to the Mac Team.

    What technology are you talking about? The same Intel updates everyone else gets? Yes, they are slow to update but it’s not like PC manufacturers are anything other that generic part assemblers. They assemble generic parts for a generic OS that they all sell with minor hardware and software tweaks.

    T-1 and T-2 chips (custom silicon) are well ahead of what’s offered on the PC and USB-C/Thunderbolt adoption is the future, as with USB back in the 90’s Apple bit the bullet and pioneered it’s use over older inferior tech when PCs lagged behind with Serial and Parallel ports as standard gear.

    It’s clear Apple is moving towards a custom ARM CPU and possibly custom graphics chips. On that side of the fence Apple is ahead of the pack. It’s worth noting that iPhones are already as powerful as base level Macs and PCs and with their own graphics API and custom silicon, they can get more performance with less silicon, than Android. We already see Android devices needing more cores and more RAM to match the iPhone’s performance. Don’t be surprised if the PC market goes the same way down the road. Apple’s custom SSD configurations (no onboard controller) in the iMacPro are already a break with the norm, which gives them above average speed.


    So you're admitting the T chips are the only thing Apple has done in the Mac lineup lately.  What do those things do?  Provide variable function keys that nobody uses and a finger print reader?  Color me not impressed.

    And now, a rookie error that somebody else had to catch.

    Time for an upgrade!
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 62 of 98
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    dewme said: This is another black eye on Apple’s quality process and needs to be fixed immediately. 
    Unfortunately, this is the case. This was a major "oversight" and one that clearly indicates a lack of testing by Apple QC.

    Either that or they knew of the issue, but released anyway, with a desire to remedy post-launch (which would be troubling). 

    But it sounds like they were inexplicably unaware as some rando was able to identify a major issue by simple running. couple tests that represented what a huge portion of Mac customers would be doing on a daily basis.

    This is pretty bad negligence. There is no way around it. Would be great to see this kind of thing improve in the coming year. 

    They are human beings, so mistakes happen. But this one in particular was entirely avoidable.

    And the whole idea of Apple "working with Lee" is really lame. As if they needed his testing to identify the issue. They could just test themselves.

    I have the 2106 MBP 15 fully upgraded. And I love it. No keyboard issues, no nothing. The Touch Bar DID lock up and crash on me a few times when I first bought it - but that was remedied by a patch that came out shortly after I made the purchase. 

    But if you upgrade to the fastest CPU possible and it throttles that severely from doing some work on a very popular app and it go unnoticed by Apple prior to release... I am not feeling the love. 
    I's obvious that this is basically a release bug, those are the hardest to QA properly since it's not really part of the normal software but added in deployment once the main software has been developed in tested extensively.

    The normal QA process for the software probably didn't see it because on their machine, the drivers and low level software is not signed.

    The device mostly functioned as expected for most people so it's not like the machine was broken. Lower level machines seemingly had the same bug, I7 but it didn't show up substantially. That means it wasn't an easy thing to see.

    It was a release/deployment bug that seemingly only appeared clearly on one configuration in certain circumstances.

    StrangeDaysbb-15
     2Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 63 of 98
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    leighr said:
    The real question here is why on earth does Premiere Pro take 8 times longer to render the same 5 minute video?
    Parts of Premiere pro is crap would be my first guess...  I've suspected as much since 1996
    fastasleep
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 64 of 98
    SpamSandwichspamsandwich Posts: 33,407member


    Did the i7 results improve post patch?
    Yes: "The bug affects every new generation of the MacBook Pro, including both the 13-inch and 15-inch sizes and all of the Intel processor configurations."
    Yes, but since they performed actual pre-patch tests on the i7 I assume they did so again post-patch. It would be nice to know the results. 
    We're still working on them. They are improved.
    Hey, Mike congrats on appearing on The New Screen Savers! That was a real surprise!
    Thanks much! It developed very quickly on Friday into Saturday's filming.
    Would be great if you got a regular spot on there.
    cgWerks
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 65 of 98
    jcs2305jcs2305 Posts: 1,342member
    No matter how you cut this, it was sloppy.

    Combined with how Macs have both become niche products and consistently fallen behind current technology, I have to assume that Apple is looking at making some upgrades to the Mac Team.

    What technology are you talking about? The same Intel updates everyone else gets? Yes, they are slow to update but it’s not like PC manufacturers are anything other that generic part assemblers. They assemble generic parts for a generic OS that they all sell with minor hardware and software tweaks.

    T-1 and T-2 chips (custom silicon) are well ahead of what’s offered on the PC and USB-C/Thunderbolt adoption is the future, as with USB back in the 90’s Apple bit the bullet and pioneered it’s use over older inferior tech when PCs lagged behind with Serial and Parallel ports as standard gear.

    It’s clear Apple is moving towards a custom ARM CPU and possibly custom graphics chips. On that side of the fence Apple is ahead of the pack. It’s worth noting that iPhones are already as powerful as base level Macs and PCs and with their own graphics API and custom silicon, they can get more performance with less silicon, than Android. We already see Android devices needing more cores and more RAM to match the iPhone’s performance. Don’t be surprised if the PC market goes the same way down the road. Apple’s custom SSD configurations (no onboard controller) in the iMacPro are already a break with the norm, which gives them above average speed.


    All of that aside.. I have to agree with the OP this was plain sloppy. I am not sure what the OP is talking about with falling behind with current technology, but this kind of stuff shouldn't happen with products coming from a company like Apple.  We can defend it here, but that still doesn't excuse it. Apple is probably the mostly heavily scrutinized company on the planet so this kind of stuff is magnified x10. 

    We can rationalize it and give props to Apple for recognizing this so quickly and taking care of it. We can talk down on the bloggers and Youtube tech folks, but the fact remains that thousands of people believe what they read and see on Youtube. Look at this from Wired News.. with a typo no less..

    "When Apple revealed its newest MacBook Pro laptops in New York City two weeks ago, it naturally emphasized the computers' performance capabilities. Apple's line of pro laptops is targeted toward creative professionals who do processor-intensive work on their PCs, and Apple was eager to appeal to them. There was just one issue, as some early buyers soon found out: In certain scenarios the machines were underperforming due to thermal throttling. Apple now says it's aware of the issue and is releasing a software fix to address it. In a statement released today, the company says it's discovered a bug that's been slowing down processor speeds when the machine gets hot. “Following extensive performance".

    I was under the impression that this issue only affected models with the i9 processor specifically. If someone who has no background info on this matter reads this they see Apple's pricey new laptops have thermal issues that make it throttle and not perform as advertised. Which leads too ... these types of comments from Yahoo readers and other sites I have seen..

    "Apple is developing quite a little reputation for crippling its products and hoping you'll replace them."

    "I don't believe it was a "bug" it was meant to keep the system from running too hot because of it's poor cooling macbooks have. I expect with this software update it will just run hot all the time causing it to be more likely to overheat and ruin the laptop. Like the old macbooks from 2012 did their was even a class action where apple was forced to offer free repairs of course they never informed the public but it is fact"

    "Apple apologies again that they got caught throttling their products."

    "I can't remember when Apple has released any computer platform that isn't handicapped or suffer manufacture failures from GPU's, to CPU's Keyboard's to removing earphone jacks from their iPhones noisy keyboards touch pad failures. Now here comes another newly released Macbook Pro 2018 and it's a total failure. Typical of a company that charges premium prices for low end products that break and break and break without the ability to repair unless apple says you can."


    My point again is there are thousands of people that have no clue what they are talking about, but have the ability to create a very negative narrative and view of Apple and it's products with people who don't care to know the real truth. It's like the millions of people in this country that vote a certain way because dad and grandpa said they should. These people don't have the will to think for themselves and are ok being spoon fed wrong, or just plain outlandish information.

    I love my Apple products and will continue to defend them when it is appropriate, but I can't just let this go. After the way the Iphone battery throttling issue was handled and now this .. I am just disappointed. I will still be a customer going forward, but this is just sloppy, and shouldn't have happened. :(
    GeorgeBMac
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 66 of 98
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,270member
    I'd like to know what's up with Geekbench 4...
    Running my own compute-intensive, POSIX-threaded apps on the i9 MBP, Intel Power Gadget (the just-updated version), shows Utilization pegged at 100% and the processor frequency stays above 3.2 GHz. Temperature stays under 100C and cooling fans sound like they're running significantly slower (and quietly) than before yesterday's supplemental update. Performance is great.
    Running the Geekbench 4 CPU benchmark, singled-threaded utilization often falls below 1% and multi-threaded utilization rarely rises above 50%. The processor frequency is all over the place and averages about 2 GHz single-threaded and below 2 GHz multithreaded. Temperature averages about 80C. Yet scores are good at 5600+/23300+ (without going to great pains to maximize the multi-threaded score).
    edited July 2018
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 67 of 98
    ElCapitanelcapitan Posts: 372member
    For a product in the absolute top tier price range for portable systems, there is really no excuse for letting a bug like this slip.

    It also seems like the 15" is quite under-dimensioned for the thermal envelope of the sum of components in it, which may shorten the lifetime of the machine.  

    I will not be surprised to find that also the GPU is thermally throttled under real load when the CPU is loaded. Add to that load on all the Thunderbolt ports, and you have another source of heat that must be dissipated.

    In the "old days" sufficiently cooling was a necessity for the hard drives not to crash. Perhaps they should test with old fashioned drives inside the enclosure again. 


     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 68 of 98
    thttht Posts: 5,913member
    cpsro said:
    I'd like to know what's up with Geekbench 4...
    Running my own compute-intensive, POSIX-threaded apps on the i9 MBP, Intel Power Gadget (the just-updated version), shows 100% utilization and the processor frequency stays above 3.2 GHz. Temperature stays under 100C and cooling fans sound like they're running significantly slower than before yesterday's supplemental update. Performance is great.
    Running the Geekbench 4 CPU benchmark, singled-threaded utilization often falls below 1% and multi-threaded utilization rarely rises above 50%. The processor frequency is all over the place and averages about 2 GHz single-threaded and below 2 GHz multithreaded, yet scores are good at 5600+/23300+ (without going to great pains to maximize the multi-threaded score).
    Geekbench has pauses in its benchmark runs so as to reduce the effect of throttling on their benchmark. The pauses are there to let the CPU cool down in order to maintain maximum frequencies. In effect, it is measuring the computing capacity of the processor. 

    cgWerks
     0Likes 0Dislikes 1Informative
  • Reply 69 of 98
    dewmedewme Posts: 6,005member
    It’s clear Apple is moving towards a custom ARM CPU and possibly custom graphics chips. On that side of the fence Apple is ahead of the pack. It’s worth noting that iPhones are already as powerful as base level Macs and PCs and with their own graphics API and custom silicon, they can get more performance with less silicon, than Android. We already see Android devices needing more cores and more RAM to match the iPhone’s performance. Don’t be surprised if the PC market goes the same way down the road. Apple’s custom SSD configurations (no onboard controller) in the iMacPro are already a break with the norm, which gives them above average speed.


    Regarding Apple's ARM work... has Apple (or anyone else) developed a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM that runs x86 guest operating systems/apps at sufficiently high levels of performance? I don't follow this area very much and I'm wondering what a move to ARM would mean for the large number of current macOS software apps that would have to run on such a CPU, even if only a stopgap measure as apps get ported to run natively on ARM. No doubt that Apple (and Microsoft) has a head start with its iOS apps but what about the big ticket third party apps?
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 70 of 98
    ElCapitanelcapitan Posts: 372member
    dewme said:
    It’s clear Apple is moving towards a custom ARM CPU and possibly custom graphics chips. On that side of the fence Apple is ahead of the pack. It’s worth noting that iPhones are already as powerful as base level Macs and PCs and with their own graphics API and custom silicon, they can get more performance with less silicon, than Android. We already see Android devices needing more cores and more RAM to match the iPhone’s performance. Don’t be surprised if the PC market goes the same way down the road. Apple’s custom SSD configurations (no onboard controller) in the iMacPro are already a break with the norm, which gives them above average speed.


    Regarding Apple's ARM work... has Apple (or anyone else) developed a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM that runs x86 guest operating systems/apps at sufficiently high levels of performance? I don't follow this area very much and I'm wondering what a move to ARM would mean for the large number of current macOS software apps that would have to run on such a CPU, even if only a stopgap measure as apps get ported to run natively on ARM. No doubt that Apple (and Microsoft) has a head start with its iOS apps but what about the big ticket third party apps?
    It would be the PPC to Intel transition in reverse, with significant of overhead in running Intel based applications in emulation. 

    In addition a large number of libraries, corporate and open source apps would never be ported over. Today we get those almost for free as long as Apple use Intel. In the PPC days, there was a significant lack of software in many sectors which made the Mac unviable.  While you would get some influx of iOS apps ported over, in many cases they are too light weight for business.  
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 71 of 98
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,270member
    tht said:
    cpsro said:
    I'd like to know what's up with Geekbench 4...
    Running my own compute-intensive, POSIX-threaded apps on the i9 MBP, Intel Power Gadget (the just-updated version), shows 100% utilization and the processor frequency stays above 3.2 GHz. Temperature stays under 100C and cooling fans sound like they're running significantly slower than before yesterday's supplemental update. Performance is great.
    Running the Geekbench 4 CPU benchmark, singled-threaded utilization often falls below 1% and multi-threaded utilization rarely rises above 50%. The processor frequency is all over the place and averages about 2 GHz single-threaded and below 2 GHz multithreaded, yet scores are good at 5600+/23300+ (without going to great pains to maximize the multi-threaded score).
    Geekbench has pauses in its benchmark runs so as to reduce the effect of throttling on their benchmark. The pauses are there to let the CPU cool down in order to maintain maximum frequencies. In effect, it is measuring the computing capacity of the processor. 

    I can see that, and it's even more obvious when Power Gadget's polling frequency is increased. The Speech Recognition test is about the only one that seems to fully utilize the uP in multithreaded mode. It looks like most tests don't. Seems like GB should offer an option to eliminate the pauses--for relevance to big compute jobs, this would be a more representative trial.
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 72 of 98
    bb-15bb-15 Posts: 283member
    jcs2305 said:
    No matter how you cut this, it was sloppy.

    Combined with how Macs have both become niche products and consistently fallen behind current technology, I have to assume that Apple is looking at making some upgrades to the Mac Team.

    What technology are you talking about? The same Intel updates everyone else gets? Yes, they are slow to update but it’s not like PC manufacturers are anything other that generic part assemblers. They assemble generic parts for a generic OS that they all sell with minor hardware and software tweaks.

    T-1 and T-2 chips (custom silicon) are well ahead of what’s offered on the PC and USB-C/Thunderbolt adoption is the future, as with USB back in the 90’s Apple bit the bullet and pioneered it’s use over older inferior tech when PCs lagged behind with Serial and Parallel ports as standard gear.

    It’s clear Apple is moving towards a custom ARM CPU and possibly custom graphics chips. On that side of the fence Apple is ahead of the pack. It’s worth noting that iPhones are already as powerful as base level Macs and PCs and with their own graphics API and custom silicon, they can get more performance with less silicon, than Android. We already see Android devices needing more cores and more RAM to match the iPhone’s performance. Don’t be surprised if the PC market goes the same way down the road. Apple’s custom SSD configurations (no onboard controller) in the iMacPro are already a break with the norm, which gives them above average speed.



    We can rationalize it and give props to Apple for recognizing this so quickly and taking care of it. We can talk down on the bloggers and Youtube tech folks, but the fact remains that thousands of people believe what they read and see on Youtube. 
    Apple users are in the minority. Worldwide, iPhone marketshare is about 15% and Mac OS marketshare is about 9%.
    The anti-Apple campaigns feed into the dislike of Apple by the majority. Nothing will change that. 

    It is like groups in the school yard, the majority picks on the minority about clothes, music and about being nerdy. 
    At that level of discussion, things are never in context (like mentioning that Dell i9 laptops also throttle).

    As for the MacBook Pro throttling issue, it was a minor glitch which was caught quickly and fixed. 
    Compare that to the Samsung Note 7 disaster for an example of a major tech screw up. 
    edited July 2018
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 73 of 98
    GeorgeBMacgeorgebmac Posts: 11,421member
    foggyhill said:
    dewme said: This is another black eye on Apple’s quality process and needs to be fixed immediately. 
    Unfortunately, this is the case. This was a major "oversight" and one that clearly indicates a lack of testing by Apple QC.

    Either that or they knew of the issue, but released anyway, with a desire to remedy post-launch (which would be troubling). 

    But it sounds like they were inexplicably unaware as some rando was able to identify a major issue by simple running. couple tests that represented what a huge portion of Mac customers would be doing on a daily basis.

    This is pretty bad negligence. There is no way around it. Would be great to see this kind of thing improve in the coming year. 

    They are human beings, so mistakes happen. But this one in particular was entirely avoidable.

    And the whole idea of Apple "working with Lee" is really lame. As if they needed his testing to identify the issue. They could just test themselves.

    I have the 2106 MBP 15 fully upgraded. And I love it. No keyboard issues, no nothing. The Touch Bar DID lock up and crash on me a few times when I first bought it - but that was remedied by a patch that came out shortly after I made the purchase. 

    But if you upgrade to the fastest CPU possible and it throttles that severely from doing some work on a very popular app and it go unnoticed by Apple prior to release... I am not feeling the love. 
    I's obvious that this is basically a release bug, those are the hardest to QA properly since it's not really part of the normal software but added in deployment once the main software has been developed in tested extensively.

    The normal QA process for the software probably didn't see it because on their machine, the drivers and low level software is not signed.

    The device mostly functioned as expected for most people so it's not like the machine was broken. Lower level machines seemingly had the same bug, I7 but it didn't show up substantially. That means it wasn't an easy thing to see.

    It was a release/deployment bug that seemingly only appeared clearly on one configuration in certain circumstances.

    As a developer I always tried to get a "parallel" test on any new system -- where the whole system was run under real life conditions -- just to catch those bugs that 'slip through the cracks' and destroy credibility.  It sounds like Apple skipped that step.  Well, they're young.   They'll learn.
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 74 of 98
    cgWerkscgwerks Posts: 2,952member
    Wait... this can’t be... I thought, no, I KNEW, that Apple’s “obsession” with thinness was causing this problem. After all, sooooo many commenters here (less so than other sites), at 9to5, and macrumors said so. /s

    They stated it with such emphatic belief, like it was just an accepted fact. They didn’t wait for more information, they didn’t hesitate, they just repeated the narrative propagated by a few influential pundits. I find it quite annoying that so much nonsense spreads so fast, and those of us who call for cool heads always get accused of being fanboys. No, actually we just like to have all the facts before jumping to a conclusion. 
    Well, Apple does seem to have an unhealthy obsession with thinness.... and it has caused us to lose other things. So, a bit hasty, but not unwarranted.

    leighr said:
    The real question here is why on earth does Premiere Pro take 8 times longer to render the same 5 minute video?
    Adobe
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 75 of 98
    cgWerkscgwerks Posts: 2,952member
    ElCapitan said:
    dewme said:Regarding Apple's ARM work... has Apple (or anyone else) developed a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM that runs x86 guest operating systems/apps at sufficiently high levels of performance? I don't follow this area very much and I'm wondering what a move to ARM would mean for the large number of current macOS software apps that would have to run on such a CPU, even if only a stopgap measure as apps get ported to run natively on ARM. No doubt that Apple (and Microsoft) has a head start with its iOS apps but what about the big ticket third party apps?
    It would be the PPC to Intel transition in reverse, with significant of overhead in running Intel based applications in emulation. 

    In addition a large number of libraries, corporate and open source apps would never be ported over. Today we get those almost for free as long as Apple use Intel. In the PPC days, there was a significant lack of software in many sectors which made the Mac unviable.  While you would get some influx of iOS apps ported over, in many cases they are too light weight for business.  
    Yes, this assumes Apple is even interested in that market. That last sentence may well sum up future plans.

    bb-15 said:
    Apple users are in the minority. Worldwide, iPhone marketshare is about 15% and Mac OS marketshare is about 9%. ...
    Those numbers may as well be made up, though. They are baloney... always have been.

    What matters is who is making the money (in terms of the company), and if there are enough numbers to draw sufficient development and support.

    Also, you'll get a lot more accurate numbers if you look at things like web-traffic to the right kind of websites or use of certain kinds of apps, etc. Market-sure just means how many of something shipped in some time period... and when you're looking at Windows vs Mac or Android vs iOS, it isn't an 'apples to apples' comparison in the first place, let alone other factors.

    GeorgeBMac said:
    As a developer I always tried to get a "parallel" test on any new system -- where the whole system was run under real life conditions -- just to catch those bugs that 'slip through the cracks' and destroy credibility.  It sounds like Apple skipped that step.  Well, they're young.   They'll learn.
    Maybe the QC process consists of Jony presenting it on a platter to Tim and Tim says, 'ship it, Jony!' ? :)
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 76 of 98
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,270member
    Upon further testing with my own production apps, I'm seeing instances of severe over-throttling of the i9 when running processes that both use a lot of memory (over 4 GB) and that are dominated by random memory accesses.  At the extreme (memory usage over 20 GB on a system with 32 GB total memory), I'm seeing steady-state frequencies under 2 GHz and total processor package power usage of only ~11 watts.  If other, smaller jobs are run simultaneously with a large one, the frequency immediately jumps to 2.7 GHz or more. If smaller jobs are run alone, the frequency is 2.9 GHz or higher.

    It's as though a hypervisor detects that my large process is spending most of its time waiting for random memory accesses to be satisfied, so it decides to throttle the CPU to make the user wait even longer for the results. (Gee, thanks!)
    edited July 2018
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 77 of 98
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    foggyhill said:
    dewme said: This is another black eye on Apple’s quality process and needs to be fixed immediately. 
    Unfortunately, this is the case. This was a major "oversight" and one that clearly indicates a lack of testing by Apple QC.

    Either that or they knew of the issue, but released anyway, with a desire to remedy post-launch (which would be troubling). 

    But it sounds like they were inexplicably unaware as some rando was able to identify a major issue by simple running. couple tests that represented what a huge portion of Mac customers would be doing on a daily basis.

    This is pretty bad negligence. There is no way around it. Would be great to see this kind of thing improve in the coming year. 

    They are human beings, so mistakes happen. But this one in particular was entirely avoidable.

    And the whole idea of Apple "working with Lee" is really lame. As if they needed his testing to identify the issue. They could just test themselves.

    I have the 2106 MBP 15 fully upgraded. And I love it. No keyboard issues, no nothing. The Touch Bar DID lock up and crash on me a few times when I first bought it - but that was remedied by a patch that came out shortly after I made the purchase. 

    But if you upgrade to the fastest CPU possible and it throttles that severely from doing some work on a very popular app and it go unnoticed by Apple prior to release... I am not feeling the love. 
    I's obvious that this is basically a release bug, those are the hardest to QA properly since it's not really part of the normal software but added in deployment once the main software has been developed in tested extensively.

    The normal QA process for the software probably didn't see it because on their machine, the drivers and low level software is not signed.

    The device mostly functioned as expected for most people so it's not like the machine was broken. Lower level machines seemingly had the same bug, I7 but it didn't show up substantially. That means it wasn't an easy thing to see.

    It was a release/deployment bug that seemingly only appeared clearly on one configuration in certain circumstances.

    As a developer I always tried to get a "parallel" test on any new system -- where the whole system was run under real life conditions -- just to catch those bugs that 'slip through the cracks' and destroy credibility.  It sounds like Apple skipped that step.  Well, they're young.   They'll learn.
    Right... "real life conditions", why not fire QA and stop betas and just automate everything by putting a few machine on test beds, since testing in "real life conditions" tm will fix everything. How the frack do you define those conditions genius. You think there are not bugs that can run trough your tests if you are not testing all possible use cases and system variants (which is is not probable). 

    I've been doing very very large systems for 30 years and what you describe is garage level development, it's a lot more involved in things like what Apple is doing.

    There was also a time were security was non existent in drivers (not long ago at all) and that kind of bug would never have occurred.
    Testing deployment procedures is a lot harder that's why you tend to keep things as simple as possible. Maybe
    It's possible they actually signed those firmwares before and some script change introduced a bug  (not signed, wrong cert, etC) that wasn't caught by existing regression testing. They do need to make sure the testing tests the right thing for sure; and they no doubt fixed that now.

    Considering the bug was not obvious and only hit the I9 while existing in all configs, it's highly possible it actually passed integration testing (or even regression tests from previous deployments). So, not "no test", but possibly a flaw in the testing.

    fastasleep
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 78 of 98
    cgWerkscgwerks Posts: 2,952member
    foggyhill said:
    You think there are not bugs that can run trough your tests if you are not testing all possible use cases and system variants (which is is not probable). 
    I think what people are a bit shocked about... is we're not talking all possible variants here. If the bug had showed up running version 3.12 of WizardCAD while the user stood on their head, that would be one thing. But, if it shows up running one of the more popular apps the machine is designed to run, people think, 'Why didn't they test that?!'

    But, yea, the grid could get pretty big, pretty fast. And, what kinds of things do you test with each of those popular apps, etc.? I actually think it's more problematic that it was missed in a 'final build' kind of way... a bit like if all the MBPs went out missing the right rear screw.
    GeorgeBMac
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 79 of 98
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,270member
    cgWerks said:
    foggyhill said:
    You think there are not bugs that can run trough your tests if you are not testing all possible use cases and system variants (which is is not probable). 
    I think what people are a bit shocked about... is we're not talking all possible variants here. If the bug had showed up running version 3.12 of WizardCAD while the user stood on their head, that would be one thing. But, if it shows up running one of the more popular apps the machine is designed to run, people think, 'Why didn't they test that?!'
    Regardless of the app, why should the processor be throttled further than required to meet cooling requirements (see my note above)?
    edited July 2018
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 80 of 98
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    cgWerks said:
    foggyhill said:
    You think there are not bugs that can run trough your tests if you are not testing all possible use cases and system variants (which is is not probable). 
    I think what people are a bit shocked about... is we're not talking all possible variants here. If the bug had showed up running version 3.12 of WizardCAD while the user stood on their head, that would be one thing. But, if it shows up running one of the more popular apps the machine is designed to run, people think, 'Why didn't they test that?!'

    But, yea, the grid could get pretty big, pretty fast. And, what kinds of things do you test with each of those popular apps, etc.? I actually think it's more problematic that it was missed in a 'final build' kind of way... a bit like if all the MBPs went out missing the right rear screw.
    It's not really in the "final build" seems it's a bit appart and that's the issue.  Some regression probably got introduced because they changed the way they signed the firmware and didn't think it would impact deployment (or didn't see it in their suite of tests,so regression testing was not sufficient).
    cgWerks
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
Sign In or Register to comment.