I think it's time for Apple to split into two companies- a mobile company and a computer company. Apple isn't giving as much attention and thought to the Mac anymore. This shows in making OS X more like iOS (blah!) instead of making iOS more like OS X. I don't need full screen Messages, Contacts, etc. apps for my 27" Cinema Display. In fact many full screen apps on my Mac are over 50% blank space. So silly.
And iTunes?? It's a total mess!! What used to be one of the friendliest, easiest to use pieces of software is now one of the most convoluted inefficient applications that Apple has released.
I used to work in software and Hardware QA departments at Apple for many years, There's aren't enough testers to cover everything. But it wasn't always that way. There used to be more testers per project, with lots of contractors hired when needed, and much more impromptu testing and manual testing. Unfortunately after 2000 a lot of the groups were made smaller and each tester was in charge of a lot more work. I think I worked from 10 to 15 hours a day on average including work from home in 2010. And, I was always behind, not just me, pretty much everyone, especially in graphics testing, where a lot is covered by automation. I remember graphics QA was constantly jumping from one fire to another. It would disrupt regular testing procedures, and cause lots or overtime and work piling up. Boy, I sure don't miss those days. But, I noticed the workload being overwhelming after Jobs came back to the company, but not so bad before. But that's how they pushed out so many projects and became a megastar. Another factor is the OS getting more and more convoluted with garbage like gotcha, cool effects, and mobile OS type features to match the iOS. I think the best, most stable OS's were pre OS X, I particularly liked OS 8.6 which I worked on in the 90s. The last best OS was Snow Leopard which I still user on a Mac Mini for TV box, but I'm biased because that was my last project worked on over there. I actually do use Yosemite on a 2011 MacBook Pro, but it's dog slow and crashes a lot. Apple's OS's didn't used to obsolete 4 year old hardware.
I used to work in software and Hardware QA departments at Apple for many years, There's aren't enough testers to cover everything. But it wasn't always that way. There used to be more testers per project, with lots of contractors hired when needed, and much more impromptu testing and manual testing. Unfortunately after 2000 a lot of the groups were made smaller and each tester was in charge of a lot more work. I think I worked from 10 to 15 hours a day on average including work from home in 2010. And, I was always behind, not just me, pretty much everyone, especially in graphics testing, where a lot is covered by automation. I remember graphics QA was constantly jumping from one fire to another. It would disrupt regular testing procedures, and cause lots or overtime and work piling up. Boy, I sure don't miss those days. But, I noticed the workload being overwhelming after Jobs came back to the company, but not so bad before. But that's how they pushed out so many projects and became a megastar. Another factor is the OS getting more and more convoluted with garbage like gotcha, cool effects, and mobile OS type features to match the iOS. I think the best, most stable OS's were pre OS X, I particularly liked OS 8.6 which I worked on in the 90s. The last best OS was Snow Leopard which I still user on a Mac Mini for TV box, but I'm biased because that was my last project worked on over there. I actually do use Yosemite on a 2011 MacBook Pro, but it's dog slow and crashes a lot. Apple's OS's didn't used to obsolete 4 year old hardware.
I must have got lucky with my Mac Pro then... worked flawlessly with HUGE Red Raw files editing all day every day for weeks.
Used FCPX and Premiere Pro CC.
Good to hear. So much of the negative crap is suspect IMHO. I totally believe third party issues exist as the new Mac pro is a radically new design and I can well believe a lot of it is driver issues and conflicts.
As to those say never buy new Apple hardware, i think I bought every one from the Mac Plus onwards and never saw any particular trend of newer gear having major issues. I had the Mac IIfx, Quadra 840s (several) and so on ... all bleeding edge new designs. The one I didn't go for was the water cooled dual G5, I had the first duel G5 that was air cooled and it worked flawlessly around the clock. I have never regretted diving in and buying a new Mac model.
I think it's time for Apple to split into two companies- a mobile company and a computer company. Apple isn't giving as much attention and thought to the Mac anymore. This shows in making OS X more like iOS (blah!) instead of making iOS more like OS X. I don't need full screen Messages, Contacts, etc. apps for my 27" Cinema Display. In fact many full screen apps on my Mac are over 50% blank space. So silly.
And iTunes?? It's a total mess!! What used to be one of the friendliest, easiest to use pieces of software is now one of the most convoluted inefficient applications that Apple has released.
Totally agree.
iPhone is the cash cow for Apple. It has no reason to spend much resource on the mac line other than maintaining it as an iOS app development platform. That's why OSX is becoming more like iOS.
There were mold lines in the plastic that looked like cracks. Except they weren't; for starters, you couldn't get them to take up dye, which cracks should do. (I had several of them at the time to check for cracking.)
Lots of pissing and moaning about the (cosmetic) issue, though, so those whose favorite sport was P&M were happy, so there's that, I suppose.
Totally agree.
iPhone is the cash cow for Apple. It has no reason to spend much resource on the mac line other than maintaining it as an iOS app development platform. That's why OSX is becoming more like iOS.
But OS X isn't becoming more like iOS as far as I can tell. They are however assuming many of each other's abilities so as to work more seamlessly together, AirDrop etc. Do you have specific examples of where OS X is becoming like iOS I may be missing? I assume the artistic look isn't what is being meant here, we are talking about the functionality, right?
I must have got lucky with my Mac Pro then... worked flawlessly with HUGE Red Raw files editing all day every day for weeks.
Used FCPX and Premiere Pro CC.
Unbelievable that this article is written around one package.
It would be helpful if Appleinsider would bash the appropriate company for the end users issues, rather than simply targeting Apple. BMD has a long history of being very sloppy and not working within industry standards.
Resolve has been know to contain a large number of bugs.
It can't even import a number of raw camera files properly, let alone process them in a way that looks right.
Cdn Bob.
Incredible that a story about an absolutely income-threatening issue for people who depend on professional levels of performance should be dismissed as click bait. I guess this is indicative of how consumer-centric Apple has pushed the platform. "Don't bore me with your convoluted technical problems, I've got pictures to post on Instagram and tweets I need to keep me entertained" Well sorry, we priced a Mac Pro the other day to equivalent spec to a 2011 12-core and it. cost $13.000 -so it had better work. In a broadcast and feature film universe, no one cuts you any slack for "driver issues" when they're watching 4K at a cinema test screening Bored with that? Go back to Angry Birds on your pad.
Incredible that a story about an absolutely income-threatening issue for people who depend on professional levels of performance should be dismissed as click bait. I guess this is indicative of how consumer-centric Apple has pushed the platform. "Don't bore me with your convoluted technical problems, I've got pictures to post on Instagram and tweets I need to keep me entertained" Well sorry, we priced a Mac Pro the other day to equivalent spec to a 2011 12-core and it. cost $13.000 -so it had better work. In a broadcast and feature film universe, no one cuts you any slack for "driver issues" when they're watching 4K at a cinema test screening Bored with that? Go back to Angry Birds on your pad.
Whoosh. Your post is no different than the posts you're complaining about. It's no different than if Angry Birds was buggy on iOS devices. It's a multimillion dollar app that's buggy on a single platform. Actually, Angry Birds is probably a more valuable user base than DaVinci Resolve user base in terms of dollars. The point is that this is one third-party app failing for some on a single Mac Pro GPU hardware. It's not good but it's not widespread. Call me when FCPX begins to fail on the Mac Pro and affect millions of users.
Really? Affect is one thing, kill your pictures is another. On the other matter, FCP X remains barely usable in a chained workflow environment which is why FCP7 is still ubiquitous. Opinions vary I know - but FCP X is a horrid slippery slidy tool for editorial handoff. Not a bug, just idiotic design.
People have run through projects without any problems and then on export, the glitches show up and they could be close to a deadline with no backup solution like disabling hardware acceleration. It's probably not a widespread problem because of how few people do this kind of high-end work but the glitches could be present on a large amount of Apple products.
Apple develops and issues drivers for OS X probably in collaboration with the GPU manufacturers. AMD and NVidia issue drivers themselves for Windows. Here's a recent one from AMD:
It's a beta driver and they include OpenCL updates. They note that there are known issues but some changes make huge improvements in specific cases and people can test it if they want and rollback to an older version if it's no good. They improved the performance of a particular game by 50%.
I don't know if Apple will ever go the route of letting AMD/NVidia issue updates for OS X but what they could do is have a system panel that lets you change to a different display driver. AMD or NVidia could make driver changes and instead of issuing them manually, they would be distributed by Apple and appear in the OS X panel as available to download and what improvements they make. Then it should be as simple as clicking the driver version to switch from one to the other. They wouldn't have to be bundled with OS updates.
The biggest problem IMO is not being able to let Apple, AMD or Blackmagic know what's going wrong. End users have no way of debugging a GPU. If a program crashes, you get a report; if you get a kernel panic, there's a report; if a program hangs you can sample it. If the GPU scrambles the frame, there's no way to record what happened. The XCode debugging tools let people see what a GPU is doing but perhaps there can be a system feature that just records a GPU driver sample. You just have it enabled when you expect a glitch to occur or just as you see a glitch and then send the driver log to Apple or the software provider and they'd at least have something to go on.
The reports are saying it does it with UHD (4K/5K) footage, some people working at 1080p or so haven't been affected. The GPUs will have to be outputting this footage to the display over Thunderbolt while rendering it on both of the GPUs. Da Vinci is one of the few apps to use both GPUs.
A couple of people mentioned earlier about there being too few employees at Apple put to work on these issues and being overworked. They should have the resources to hire more people to look into these problems, even contract driver developers from NVidia/AMD to stress test the drivers and hardware of the machines they put out and design drivers with fault awareness so that they are able to report in detail what happened when something goes wrong. It's just reassuring for the system to have a log of what happened. iOS has this. Candy Crush was crashing for me a few times and I went into the diagnostic panel and it had a bunch of low memory logs so I knew what was going on. These people have nothing to go on; they see the fault and they talk to Apple, AMD, Blackmagic and all they can say is that they can't replicate the problem. Even if they can eventually replicate the issue, it's a really inefficient process for diagnosing and fixing issues.
I don't think iWork is that bad. Besides, I think Apple factors them into the sale of all hardware - part of the "Apple Tax".
Really? Compared to what? Apple chopped an enormous number of features from all, but Pages 5 in particular, made it Export bad copies to Word and produce pdfs with text missing.
To cap it off it has trouble with third party servers and is incompatible lately with everything other than itself on Yosemite and iOS 8.
Other than that it is brilliant!
Thankfully most Mac users don't know how to do much with it, don't even notice when Apple switches it on their Macs, despite it looks radically different, until they have problems opening and saving different versions. The state of current Mac users is how Apple gets away with what it does.
Comments
I can see that turning out great…
I think that's a lazy question mark ... not an upside-down exclamation mark and I have no idea how to make either! I must be so uncool!
I must have got lucky with my Mac Pro then... worked flawlessly with HUGE Red Raw files editing all day every day for weeks.
Used FCPX and Premiere Pro CC.
They probably dedicate the proportional amount of resources that the Mac Pro generates in revenue. .1% I'm guessing
They probably dedicate the proportional amount of resources that the Mac Pro generates in revenue. .1% I'm guessing
Explains why Apple is giving away the latest iWork apps.
I used to work in software and Hardware QA departments at Apple for many years, There's aren't enough testers to cover everything. But it wasn't always that way. There used to be more testers per project, with lots of contractors hired when needed, and much more impromptu testing and manual testing. Unfortunately after 2000 a lot of the groups were made smaller and each tester was in charge of a lot more work. I think I worked from 10 to 15 hours a day on average including work from home in 2010. And, I was always behind, not just me, pretty much everyone, especially in graphics testing, where a lot is covered by automation. I remember graphics QA was constantly jumping from one fire to another. It would disrupt regular testing procedures, and cause lots or overtime and work piling up. Boy, I sure don't miss those days. But, I noticed the workload being overwhelming after Jobs came back to the company, but not so bad before. But that's how they pushed out so many projects and became a megastar. Another factor is the OS getting more and more convoluted with garbage like gotcha, cool effects, and mobile OS type features to match the iOS. I think the best, most stable OS's were pre OS X, I particularly liked OS 8.6 which I worked on in the 90s. The last best OS was Snow Leopard which I still user on a Mac Mini for TV box, but I'm biased because that was my last project worked on over there. I actually do use Yosemite on a 2011 MacBook Pro, but it's dog slow and crashes a lot. Apple's OS's didn't used to obsolete 4 year old hardware.
I would not know where to start on your post!
Good to hear. So much of the negative crap is suspect IMHO. I totally believe third party issues exist as the new Mac pro is a radically new design and I can well believe a lot of it is driver issues and conflicts.
As to those say never buy new Apple hardware, i think I bought every one from the Mac Plus onwards and never saw any particular trend of newer gear having major issues. I had the Mac IIfx, Quadra 840s (several) and so on ... all bleeding edge new designs. The one I didn't go for was the water cooled dual G5, I had the first duel G5 that was air cooled and it worked flawlessly around the clock. I have never regretted diving in and buying a new Mac model.
I think it's time for Apple to split into two companies- a mobile company and a computer company. Apple isn't giving as much attention and thought to the Mac anymore. This shows in making OS X more like iOS (blah!) instead of making iOS more like OS X. I don't need full screen Messages, Contacts, etc. apps for my 27" Cinema Display. In fact many full screen apps on my Mac are over 50% blank space. So silly.
And iTunes?? It's a total mess!! What used to be one of the friendliest, easiest to use pieces of software is now one of the most convoluted inefficient applications that Apple has released.
Totally agree.
iPhone is the cash cow for Apple. It has no reason to spend much resource on the mac line other than maintaining it as an iOS app development platform. That's why OSX is becoming more like iOS.
Guess the cracks in the Cube never happened,
There were mold lines in the plastic that looked like cracks. Except they weren't; for starters, you couldn't get them to take up dye, which cracks should do. (I had several of them at the time to check for cracking.)
Lots of pissing and moaning about the (cosmetic) issue, though, so those whose favorite sport was P&M were happy, so there's that, I suppose.
But OS X isn't becoming more like iOS as far as I can tell. They are however assuming many of each other's abilities so as to work more seamlessly together, AirDrop etc. Do you have specific examples of where OS X is becoming like iOS I may be missing? I assume the artistic look isn't what is being meant here, we are talking about the functionality, right?
If so it must be just me being lucky that Apple also make the best laptops, headless minis and desktop computers out there then ...
I don't think iWork is that bad. Besides, I think Apple factors them into the sale of all hardware - part of the "Apple Tax".
Incredible that a story about an absolutely income-threatening issue for people who depend on professional levels of performance should be dismissed as click bait. I guess this is indicative of how consumer-centric Apple has pushed the platform. "Don't bore me with your convoluted technical problems, I've got pictures to post on Instagram and tweets I need to keep me entertained" Well sorry, we priced a Mac Pro the other day to equivalent spec to a 2011 12-core and it. cost $13.000 -so it had better work. In a broadcast and feature film universe, no one cuts you any slack for "driver issues" when they're watching 4K at a cinema test screening Bored with that? Go back to Angry Birds on your pad.
Incredible that a story about an absolutely income-threatening issue for people who depend on professional levels of performance should be dismissed as click bait. I guess this is indicative of how consumer-centric Apple has pushed the platform. "Don't bore me with your convoluted technical problems, I've got pictures to post on Instagram and tweets I need to keep me entertained" Well sorry, we priced a Mac Pro the other day to equivalent spec to a 2011 12-core and it. cost $13.000 -so it had better work. In a broadcast and feature film universe, no one cuts you any slack for "driver issues" when they're watching 4K at a cinema test screening Bored with that? Go back to Angry Birds on your pad.
Whoosh. Your post is no different than the posts you're complaining about. It's no different than if Angry Birds was buggy on iOS devices. It's a multimillion dollar app that's buggy on a single platform. Actually, Angry Birds is probably a more valuable user base than DaVinci Resolve user base in terms of dollars. The point is that this is one third-party app failing for some on a single Mac Pro GPU hardware. It's not good but it's not widespread. Call me when FCPX begins to fail on the Mac Pro and affect millions of users.
Other apps have been affected by a variety of GPU glitches. They crop up at very random times and have affected FCPX:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/19313
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4683654?start=0&tstart=0
People have run through projects without any problems and then on export, the glitches show up and they could be close to a deadline with no backup solution like disabling hardware acceleration. It's probably not a widespread problem because of how few people do this kind of high-end work but the glitches could be present on a large amount of Apple products.
Apple develops and issues drivers for OS X probably in collaboration with the GPU manufacturers. AMD and NVidia issue drivers themselves for Windows. Here's a recent one from AMD:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDCatalyst14-11-2-BetaWINReleaseNotes.aspx
It's a beta driver and they include OpenCL updates. They note that there are known issues but some changes make huge improvements in specific cases and people can test it if they want and rollback to an older version if it's no good. They improved the performance of a particular game by 50%.
I don't know if Apple will ever go the route of letting AMD/NVidia issue updates for OS X but what they could do is have a system panel that lets you change to a different display driver. AMD or NVidia could make driver changes and instead of issuing them manually, they would be distributed by Apple and appear in the OS X panel as available to download and what improvements they make. Then it should be as simple as clicking the driver version to switch from one to the other. They wouldn't have to be bundled with OS updates.
The biggest problem IMO is not being able to let Apple, AMD or Blackmagic know what's going wrong. End users have no way of debugging a GPU. If a program crashes, you get a report; if you get a kernel panic, there's a report; if a program hangs you can sample it. If the GPU scrambles the frame, there's no way to record what happened. The XCode debugging tools let people see what a GPU is doing but perhaps there can be a system feature that just records a GPU driver sample. You just have it enabled when you expect a glitch to occur or just as you see a glitch and then send the driver log to Apple or the software provider and they'd at least have something to go on.
The reports are saying it does it with UHD (4K/5K) footage, some people working at 1080p or so haven't been affected. The GPUs will have to be outputting this footage to the display over Thunderbolt while rendering it on both of the GPUs. Da Vinci is one of the few apps to use both GPUs.
A couple of people mentioned earlier about there being too few employees at Apple put to work on these issues and being overworked. They should have the resources to hire more people to look into these problems, even contract driver developers from NVidia/AMD to stress test the drivers and hardware of the machines they put out and design drivers with fault awareness so that they are able to report in detail what happened when something goes wrong. It's just reassuring for the system to have a log of what happened. iOS has this. Candy Crush was crashing for me a few times and I went into the diagnostic panel and it had a bunch of low memory logs so I knew what was going on. These people have nothing to go on; they see the fault and they talk to Apple, AMD, Blackmagic and all they can say is that they can't replicate the problem. Even if they can eventually replicate the issue, it's a really inefficient process for diagnosing and fixing issues.
Hahaha so the trash can works best with windows 8.1
The late
I don't think iWork is that bad. Besides, I think Apple factors them into the sale of all hardware - part of the "Apple Tax".
Really? Compared to what? Apple chopped an enormous number of features from all, but Pages 5 in particular, made it Export bad copies to Word and produce pdfs with text missing.
To cap it off it has trouble with third party servers and is incompatible lately with everything other than itself on Yosemite and iOS 8.
Other than that it is brilliant!
Thankfully most Mac users don't know how to do much with it, don't even notice when Apple switches it on their Macs, despite it looks radically different, until they have problems opening and saving different versions. The state of current Mac users is how Apple gets away with what it does.