I'm experiencing these exact problems and glad to see the issue addressed by others.
The artifacts happen unexpectedly and not always during a render, but it has only happened in Adobe Premiere Pro. The issue causes a complete unresponsive system, full screen graphics errors, and then either a crash or a force restart.
I've been working in FinalCut Pro since finishing the Premiere Pro project and have had zero issues. I've also had zero issues while working in Photoshop or any other program.
I've been in a chat support via Twitter and they've had me check errors during safe mode and other troubleshooting measures, but the issue still only occurs during Adobe Premiere Pro use.
Other reports claim it may be related to File Vault 2. Couple that with your own mention of the Photos app, I'm not sure there's a strong enough case to be made (yet) to say it's "likely third party software" at fault.
It does seem troubling that such an issue could strike these new models so soon after release, and especially after similar graphics problems had impacted some MBP 2011-13 models.
One wonders just how much emphasis goes on Q and A these days. Perhaps they need to spend a bit more time and money on that. Otherwise it's going to cause damage to Apple's reputation at a time when patience is already wearing thin with many pro users.
"In a serious case chronicled by a MacRumorsforum member Jan Becker, a new 15-inch MacBook Pro configured with an optional AMD Radeon Pro 460 GPU encountered trouble and ultimately crashed while transcoding video in Adobe Premiere Pro. Becker consequently took the machine into an Apple store for replacement."
"The incident did not go unnoticed by Apple. Becker said he received a call from the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., where a team of engineers asked him to help replicate the glitch over the phone and requested access to the affected laptop for further investigation."
^^^
All part of that "Q and A" you thought smart to bring up.
Apple's is from cradle to grave. Good on them.
Warranty calls and refunds are the antithesis of good QA.
The poster of the photo in the article (see 2 in 1, 2, 3, 4) thinks this may be a software issue since it occurs under scaled resolution.
Hardware issues are generally not intermittent, or if they begin intermittently they become more and more frequent and consistent then eventually end up with total failure. There is no such a pattern in reported incidents. Anyway, not such that a big deal, if this is a hardware failure Apple will resolve that.
The poster of the photo in the article (see 2 in 1, 2, 3, 4) thinks this may be a software issue since it occurs under scaled resolution.
Hardware issues are generally not intermittent, or if they begin intermittently they become more and more frequent and consistent then eventually end up with total failure. There is no such a pattern in reported incidents. Anyway, not such that a big deal, if this is a hardware failure Apple will resolve that.
Like they resolved my self-destructing MacBook Pro 3,1? Oh wait, they didn't. It intermittently went bad and spontaneously resurrected itself repeatedly, while I was unaware that there was an NVidia-funded, not-well-promoted, Apple replacement program (which replaced bad boards with other boards that would go bad). Then it died permanently after the (inconsistently applied) replacement program had already expired.
Same for a lot of people with self-destructing laptops from Apple and other brands. GPUs and laptop-sized computers/components are historically rife with "defects". Mostly the defect is in the engineering of these machines to be so small, with poor solutions for the heat they generate.
This is why I don't want an iMac or a MacBook at this point. I want a computer with replaceable components that is made for heavy work. But I'm not willing to keep using Windows and PCs (which have a slightly longer lifespan if you're really lucky, or can afford to keep replacing parts till you get a combination of things that work out for a few years with the compatibility and configuration options voodoo of PCs).
Without a business paying for my constant replacement of self-destructing computers and software subscription BS, I can't afford to buy anything at all nor do any real work. I stick with an obsolete set of computers for hobby and entertainment. I can't get a business started with my tiny amount of startup money that I'd have to repeatedly keep spending every few years as hardware self-destructs and software costs go up (looking at you, Adobe). I hate this industry. Being poor is quicksand in general, but being a person who's tools of trades are computers is even more difficult without income (i remember when digital art was supposed to be cost-effective, compared to using traditional media, ha ha ha). Yeah some people get by just fine with this world of hardware/software, but I've never been one of them and I know several artists who have suffered years of frustrations with the same crap who ended up barely scraping by or working other day-jobs instead of being able to afford life as digital artists with this abysmal technology that geeks are constantly praising as miraculous. Sure, we have incredible capabilities with these devices compared to a decade or more in the past, but the reliability has never become more than middling-to-abysmal. Middling-to-abysmal reliability has been normalized and any reasonable complaint is met with throngs of indoctrinated technogeeks bashing the complainers. Hypernormalisation instead of fixing problems. Yay humanity.
When I got my 2016 MBP I used a Time Machine backup from my Air to set it up so I wouldn't have to reinstall all my apps and reset all my preferences.
Because of a problem with iTunes I decided to wipe the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. It did not resolve the problem that prompted me to do it in the first place, but it DID clear up a problem with the cursor periodically disappearing. I can't imagine how they could be related, but it makes me wonder if decisions made during the unboxing/setup phase may affect the operation of the system.
I haven't seen the problem described in this article (2.9 i7, 460GPU), but I haven't used Photos or iMovie.
Other reports claim it may be related to File Vault 2. Couple that with your own mention of the Photos app, I'm not sure there's a strong enough case to be made (yet) to say it's "likely third party software" at fault.
It does seem troubling that such an issue could strike these new models so soon after release, and especially after similar graphics problems had impacted some MBP 2011-13 models.
One wonders just how much emphasis goes on Q and A these days. Perhaps they need to spend a bit more time and money on that. Otherwise it's going to cause damage to Apple's reputation at a time when patience is already wearing thin with many pro users.
"In a serious case chronicled by a MacRumorsforum member Jan Becker, a new 15-inch MacBook Pro configured with an optional AMD Radeon Pro 460 GPU encountered trouble and ultimately crashed while transcoding video in Adobe Premiere Pro. Becker consequently took the machine into an Apple store for replacement."
"The incident did not go unnoticed by Apple. Becker said he received a call from the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., where a team of engineers asked him to help replicate the glitch over the phone and requested access to the affected laptop for further investigation."
^^^
All part of that "Q and A" you thought smart to bring up.
Apple's is from cradle to grave. Good on them.
Warranty calls and refunds are the antithesis of good QA.
No such thing as perfect QA.
Guess who's still the best in the business, though.
The poster of the photo in the article (see 2 in 1, 2, 3, 4) thinks this may be a software issue since it occurs under scaled resolution.
Hardware issues are generally not intermittent, or if they begin intermittently they become more and more frequent and consistent then eventually end up with total failure. There is no such a pattern in reported incidents. Anyway, not such that a big deal, if this is a hardware failure Apple will resolve that.
Like they resolved my self-destructing MacBook Pro 3,1? Oh wait, they didn't. It intermittently went bad and spontaneously resurrected itself repeatedly, while I was unaware that there was an NVidia-funded, not-well-promoted, Apple replacement program (which replaced bad boards with other boards that would go bad). Then it died permanently after the (inconsistently applied) replacement program had already expired.
Same for a lot of people with self-destructing laptops from Apple and other brands. GPUs and laptop-sized computers/components are historically rife with "defects". Mostly the defect is in the engineering of these machines to be so small, with poor solutions for the heat they generate.
This is why I don't want an iMac or a MacBook at this point. I want a computer with replaceable components that is made for heavy work. But I'm not willing to keep using Windows and PCs (which have a slightly longer lifespan if you're really lucky, or can afford to keep replacing parts till you get a combination of things that work out for a few years with the compatibility and configuration options voodoo of PCs).
Without a business paying for my constant replacement of self-destructing computers and software subscription BS, I can't afford to buy anything at all nor do any real work. I stick with an obsolete set of computers for hobby and entertainment. I can't get a business started with my tiny amount of startup money that I'd have to repeatedly keep spending every few years as hardware self-destructs and software costs go up (looking at you, Adobe). I hate this industry. Being poor is quicksand in general, but being a person who's tools of trades are computers is even more difficult without income (i remember when digital art was supposed to be cost-effective, compared to using traditional media, ha ha ha). Yeah some people get by just fine with this world of hardware/software, but I've never been one of them and I know several artists who have suffered years of frustrations with the same crap who ended up barely scraping by or working other day-jobs instead of being able to afford life as digital artists with this abysmal technology that geeks are constantly praising as miraculous. Sure, we have incredible capabilities with these devices compared to a decade or more in the past, but the reliability has never become more than middling-to-abysmal. Middling-to-abysmal reliability has been normalized and any reasonable complaint is met with throngs of indoctrinated technogeeks bashing the complainers. Hypernormalisation instead of fixing problems. Yay humanity.
If there were a replacement program and you missed it, that is totally your fault. Stop blaming the world for your misfortune.
Did the article author comprehend the implications of his own writing?
Look, I've got a fully loaded 2016 MBP 15" on order with Adorama, scheduled to ship around Dec. 6th, and I will admit I am worried. Any app could be vulnerable in light of Apple photos being affected. It would be nice if Apple can fix it in software, but it's clearly a hardware issue insofar as the 2015 MBP does NOT have the same issue when running the same software and OS. What's different between the 2015 and 2016 models? The hardware!
Another thing that worries me about Apple is their understanding of how to deal with video issues. My 27" 2009 iMac i7 developed video issues just after the AppleCare expired. An email to Tim Cook got the machine fixed for free, but only after they replaced the video card twice. And then several months ago the same video problems started again, which means this "fixed" video card is toast. (Video artifacts appear and it will freeze and sometimes not boot for a long time. It seems to go longer without artifacts and freezing if I never put it to sleep and keep it warm or even hot all the time. It's strange, sad and troubling. Yet I'm a Mac lover for life. What to do.)
Graphics cards come with drivers that are specific to the card, so any hardware change does include some software as well. No idea if this is the problem, but the difference between the 2015 and 2016 models are both hardware and software.
I fail to see how your story provides evidence that problem can be chalked up to faulty third party software.
I don't know why your comment got a couple dislikes...I fully agree. I've worked for software developers for a long time and done their hardware support for decades. What the photo shows should really not be possible. That is, properly-written kernel and graphics drivers should prevent a runaway "rainbow crash" (legacy term) as we're seeing here. And the article does indeed not provide evidence that it's bad software that is culpable. So we're left with multiple questions: What supposedly bad software was it and why does the new MBP allow that software to do this? If offending software does something it's not supposed to, the OS should stop it and throw an error or, at worst, a well-handled crash (with logs for us to analyze). Not this.
Based on my experience, this smells like a graphics driver error. If I'm right, that's good news, as (once it's fixed) can easily be remedied with a software update.
If there were a replacement program and you missed it, that is totally your fault. Stop blaming the world for your misfortune.
Another example of why AppleInsider forums can be a horrible place to share thoughts. I enjoy AppleInsider articles, which is the primary reason I come here. I also come across some good dialog in these forums too. But the worst of humanity shoots forth in these forums, I must say. Many AppleInsider forum posters worship the Dislike button and have no regard for their fellow man. When someone posts a truth, they get Dislikes if their remarks aren't very pro-Apple. Nearly all the pro-Apple posts, truthful or not, get mountains of Likes. People with problems or people who vent some steam get pounded.
Just because your life is near perfect or you have a near perfect brain that can resolve all problems in your own life doesn't mean everyone else can be your clone. Have some sympathy. Stop adding woe to the existing woe of others. Stop trying to play lawyer or teacher. Encourage others and try to be friendly even when others don't reciprocate your goodness. Stop complaining about people complaining. If you read something you dislike, bite your tongue instead of clicking a Dislike or bashing that person. When a fellow Mac user needs to vent, be upbeat and supportive. Optimists make the world go 'round.
If there were a replacement program and you missed it, that is totally your fault. Stop blaming the world for your misfortune.
Another example of why AppleInsider forums can be a horrible place to share thoughts. I enjoy AppleInsider articles, which is the primary reason I come here. I also come across some good dialog in these forums too. But the worst of humanity shoots forth in these forums, I must say. Many AppleInsider forum posters worship the Dislike button and have no regard for their fellow man. When someone posts a truth, they get Dislikes if their remarks aren't very pro-Apple. Nearly all the pro-Apple posts, truthful or not, get mountains of Likes. People with problems or people who vent some steam get pounded.
Just because your life is near perfect or you have a near perfect brain that can resolve all problems in your own life doesn't mean everyone else can be your clone. Have some sympathy. Stop adding woe to the existing woe of others. Stop trying to play lawyer or teacher. Encourage others and try to be friendly even when others don't reciprocate your goodness. Stop complaining about people complaining. If you read something you dislike, bite your tongue instead of clicking a Dislike or bashing that person. When a fellow Mac user needs to vent, be upbeat and supportive. Optimists make the world go 'round.
The misfortune I was referring to was the ignorance or laziness that caused to skip over a free replacement program, not the general human condition. I have neither a perfect life nor a perfect brain yet I try to stay honest towards myself and others. I don't use this forum as a place to release steam and I try to keep my posts as factual as possible. If someone wants to release steam he can just open a blog, they are free and don't require a perfect life. I served at least two decades in that same sector and I know how hard is to make a living if your only capital is your creativity. I remember the days where a bundle of Macintosh SE and a PCL laser printer without Postscript were sold for $5000. Yet the creative people have managed to live with that and managed to change their lives and helped the world change considerably by sticking with that technology. This is a tech forum, not a literary forum. If someone wants to go into literary exercises to explain the world and the human condition there are more appropriate places for that.
My 2010 15" MBP intermittently had this problem for years. I had to live with it like that until finally the motherboard needed to be replaced. I was having constant kernel panics related to the same graphics issue. It was a little known issue that even Genius Bar employees did not know about. I found it hidden in apple support pages, which was fortunate because the cost to repair was free instead of the ~$400 it would have been. Soon after mine was repaired, they took the article off their website and that was that.
I need a new laptop but I don't trust these new MBPs yet. What is it with Apple and graphics issues?? Why can't they ever seem to get it right when it comes to the gpu?
It's because apple always tries to cut corners with cooling. I have even heard claims that the fans in apple machines will kick in "AFTER" the CPU get heat throttled, instead of kicking in before. If this is true it's a brain dead shit move for a pro machine.
At least its fun to see where the threshold for putting up with shit is with even the most hardcore apple fans. In my years hanging in this forum its the first time there was a very negative tone towards apple. Let's hope apple gets the hint that the current generation of products are garbage, so that we can get back on track to awesome hardware deserving the "pro" badge.
In the meantime it's the first time since the switch to intel that I am warning friends, family, and business asking for advice away from apple.
My 2010 15" MBP intermittently had this problem for years. I had to live with it like that until finally the motherboard needed to be replaced. I was having constant kernel panics related to the same graphics issue. It was a little known issue that even Genius Bar employees did not know about. I found it hidden in apple support pages, which was fortunate because the cost to repair was free instead of the ~$400 it would have been. Soon after mine was repaired, they took the article off their website and that was that.
I need a new laptop but I don't trust these new MBPs yet. What is it with Apple and graphics issues?? Why can't they ever seem to get it right when it comes to the gpu?
It's because apple always tries to cut corners with cooling. I have even heard claims that the fans in apple machines will kick in "AFTER" the CPU get heat throttled, instead of kicking in before. If this is true it's a brain dead shit move for a pro machine.
Not true. We have temperature utilities, so we know when the fans kick in. There are also fan utilities that allow to max the fans all the time.
My 2010 15" MBP intermittently had this problem for years. I had to live with it like that until finally the motherboard needed to be replaced. I was having constant kernel panics related to the same graphics issue. It was a little known issue that even Genius Bar employees did not know about. I found it hidden in apple support pages, which was fortunate because the cost to repair was free instead of the ~$400 it would have been. Soon after mine was repaired, they took the article off their website and that was that.
I need a new laptop but I don't trust these new MBPs yet. What is it with Apple and graphics issues?? Why can't they ever seem to get it right when it comes to the gpu?
It's because apple always tries to cut corners with cooling. I have even heard claims that the fans in apple machines will kick in "AFTER" the CPU get heat throttled, instead of kicking in before. If this is true it's a brain dead shit move for a pro machine.
At least its fun to see where the threshold for putting up with shit is with even the most hardcore apple fans. In my years hanging in this forum its the first time there was a very negative tone towards apple. Let's hope apple gets the hint that the current generation of products are garbage, so that we can get back on track to awesome hardware deserving the "pro" badge.
In the meantime it's the first time since the switch to intel that I am warning friends, family, and business asking for advice away from apple.
Back on track to where exactly? When have Apple's products ever been better than they are now? Phil Schiller pointed out the latest MBP is 6.8 million times faster than the original Powerbook, 25 years ago:
They are as fast as 2008-2010 8-core Mac Pros while using 1/10th the power. Their laptop cooling was bad years ago and they have improved it considerably since then:
AMD was noted there as having an increasing failure rate. There was the problem with the 2011 MBPs with AMD GPUs too. AMD isn't doing so well financially so they may be accepting poorer quality samples from their manufacturing partners to save money:
"A notorious example of product binning happened in some AMD processors. Upon testing, certain AMD processors can be found with defective or sub-par cores present on the silicon. Instead of scrapping the whole processor, the defective core is simply disabled but left intact and the remaining silicon is marketed as a lower tier product."
All manufacturers do this and have acceptable quality thresholds, when a company is struggling financially, they will be more likely to lower the threshold. Apple mostly sells the entry model laptops with IGPs but say they sell 1 million MBPs with dGPUs per quarter, a dGPU failure rate of 1% means 10,000 MBP failures. It just takes a handful of people online with scrambled displays to make it seem like a widespread issue. Sometimes the defect rates are higher if there's a bad batch of GPUs but nobody can tell what the failure rate is from a handful of cases.
Apple's software should be better at handling GPU driver crashes. The driver shouldn't lock up the OS, it should drop to software mode like in safe mode and restart itself when it crashes or messes up, restart the job where it failed and provide a log of what happened.
If this turns out to be a hardware issue, while I can understand Apple wanting to help a long-term partner like AMD out, if it's going to mean a higher rate of defective parts, it would be better going with NVidia. These are expensive laptops and nobody wants to be dealing with years of graphics glitches like the 2011 models again. Hopefully it turns out to be software but if it is, they also need to be looking at why this software issue keeps cropping up every few years. This hardly ever happens with Intel's IGPs.
Apple knows the problem has nothing to do with third party software.
My $4,300 MacBook Pro 15" 2.9GHz/2TB SSD/AMD Radeon Pro 460 exhibited the problem right out of the box. The only software I ever installed was a macOS Sierra update and Xcode directly from the Mac App Store.
I've explained this to 3 different Apple techs during lengthy phone calls, and to 1 Apple "Genius" at the store where I returned the computer.
If there were a replacement program and you missed it, that is totally your fault. Stop blaming the world for your misfortune.
Another example of why AppleInsider forums can be a horrible place to share thoughts. I enjoy AppleInsider articles, which is the primary reason I come here. I also come across some good dialog in these forums too. But the worst of humanity shoots forth in these forums, I must say. Many AppleInsider forum posters worship the Dislike button and have no regard for their fellow man. When someone posts a truth, they get Dislikes if their remarks aren't very pro-Apple. Nearly all the pro-Apple posts, truthful or not, get mountains of Likes. People with problems or people who vent some steam get pounded.
Just because your life is near perfect or you have a near perfect brain that can resolve all problems in your own life doesn't mean everyone else can be your clone. Have some sympathy. Stop adding woe to the existing woe of others. Stop trying to play lawyer or teacher. Encourage others and try to be friendly even when others don't reciprocate your goodness. Stop complaining about people complaining. If you read something you dislike, bite your tongue instead of clicking a Dislike or bashing that person. When a fellow Mac user needs to vent, be upbeat and supportive. Optimists make the world go 'round.
AppleInsider forums have a slight Scientology feel to them. If you don't drink the Apple KoolAid, you are an SP (suppressive personality) to be shunned. Unless you have shares in Apple you're just an enthusiastic customer. Other people's problems with your products are not a reflection on your decision-making. They are probabilty in action. A certain percentage of any product output will have defects, and sometimes with Apple a small percentage of a huge market means a lot of angry people. Lord knows I have taken the Apple name and management in vain over the last 20 years. More in the last five years though.
My 2010 15" MBP intermittently had this problem for years. I had to live with it like that until finally the motherboard needed to be replaced. I was having constant kernel panics related to the same graphics issue. It was a little known issue that even Genius Bar employees did not know about. I found it hidden in apple support pages, which was fortunate because the cost to repair was free instead of the ~$400 it would have been. Soon after mine was repaired, they took the article off their website and that was that.
I need a new laptop but I don't trust these new MBPs yet. What is it with Apple and graphics issues?? Why can't they ever seem to get it right when it comes to the gpu?
It's because apple always tries to cut corners with cooling. I have even heard claims that the fans in apple machines will kick in "AFTER" the CPU get heat throttled, instead of kicking in before. If this is true it's a brain dead shit move for a pro machine.
At least its fun to see where the threshold for putting up with shit is with even the most hardcore apple fans. In my years hanging in this forum its the first time there was a very negative tone towards apple. Let's hope apple gets the hint that the current generation of products are garbage, so that we can get back on track to awesome hardware deserving the "pro" badge.
In the meantime it's the first time since the switch to intel that I am warning friends, family, and business asking for advice away from apple.
Back on track to where exactly? When have Apple's products ever been better than they are now? Phil Schiller pointed out the latest MBP is 6.8 million times faster than the original Powerbook, 25 years ago:
They are as fast as 2008-2010 8-core Mac Pros while using 1/10th the power. Their laptop cooling was bad years ago and they have improved it considerably since then:
AMD was noted there as having an increasing failure rate. There was the problem with the 2011 MBPs with AMD GPUs too. AMD isn't doing so well financially so they may be accepting poorer quality samples from their manufacturing partners to save money:
"A notorious example of product binning happened in some AMD processors. Upon testing, certain AMD processors can be found with defective or sub-par cores present on the silicon. Instead of scrapping the whole processor, the defective core is simply disabled but left intact and the remaining silicon is marketed as a lower tier product."
All manufacturers do this and have acceptable quality thresholds, when a company is struggling financially, they will be more likely to lower the threshold. Apple mostly sells the entry model laptops with IGPs but say they sell 1 million MBPs with dGPUs per quarter, a dGPU failure rate of 1% means 10,000 MBP failures. It just takes a handful of people online with scrambled displays to make it seem like a widespread issue. Sometimes the defect rates are higher if there's a bad batch of GPUs but nobody can tell what the failure rate is from a handful of cases.
Apple's software should be better at handling GPU driver crashes. The driver shouldn't lock up the OS, it should drop to software mode like in safe mode and restart itself when it crashes or messes up, restart the job where it failed and provide a log of what happened.
If this turns out to be a hardware issue, while I can understand Apple wanting to help a long-term partner like AMD out, if it's going to mean a higher rate of defective parts, it would be better going with NVidia. These are expensive laptops and nobody wants to be dealing with years of graphics glitches like the 2011 models again. Hopefully it turns out to be software but if it is, they also need to be looking at why this software issue keeps cropping up every few years. This hardly ever happens with Intel's IGPs.
AMD has nothing to do with 2011 Macbook Pro GPU failure. That was due to the first use of lead-free solder that year. That solder didn't hold and the GPU has loosened. The GPU was intact.
Other reports claim it may be related to File Vault 2. Couple that with your own mention of the Photos app, I'm not sure there's a strong enough case to be made (yet) to say it's "likely third party software" at fault.
It does seem troubling that such an issue could strike these new models so soon after release, and especially after similar graphics problems had impacted some MBP 2011-13 models.
One wonders just how much emphasis goes on Q and A these days. Perhaps they need to spend a bit more time and money on that. Otherwise it's going to cause damage to Apple's reputation at a time when patience is already wearing thin with many pro users.
"In a serious case chronicled by a MacRumorsforum member Jan Becker, a new 15-inch MacBook Pro configured with an optional AMD Radeon Pro 460 GPU encountered trouble and ultimately crashed while transcoding video in Adobe Premiere Pro. Becker consequently took the machine into an Apple store for replacement."
"The incident did not go unnoticed by Apple. Becker said he received a call from the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., where a team of engineers asked him to help replicate the glitch over the phone and requested access to the affected laptop for further investigation."
^^^
All part of that "Q and A" you thought smart to bring up.
Apple's is from cradle to grave. Good on them.
Warranty calls and refunds are the antithesis of good QA.
No such thing as perfect QA.
Guess who's still the best in the business, though.
I am sorry but after reading through the first link I didn't bother with the second.
Please re-read it and tell me if there is something really tangible in there.
For example. Of the 58,000 subscribers that were quizzed, how many had Mac laptops? Of the rest, How many had comparable PC laptops? Could it be that a large part of the rest had low cost laptops (netbooks etc)?
What were they measuring exactly?
It just seems like pie in the sky.
Through experience I would say that you could easily find laptop brands/models that were on a par with Apple. Perhaps slightly better or slightly worse but comparing Apple with the entire PC industry would seem to away things in favour of Apple as in the opposing group you are including absolutely all the garbage that has come out over five years which is a segment that Apple just doesn't operate in.
Mine was doing it when switching users... no third party software involved here.
I had a bigger problem with the graphics card though. And it's the reason why I have returned the laptop: Battery life. 5-6 hours browsing the web and answering emails, doing nothing taxing? The battery of my four year old 13" beats that... PRAM Reset, SMC Reset - nothing helped. I then installed gfxCardStatus which tells you which of the GPUs is active. It showed that the MacBook Pro was constanly switching to the discrete GPU, even when just browsing the web. And that's precisely when the battery drained. I could literally watch the percentage dwindle when the discrete card was active.
It feels like an unfinished product to me, like Apple has a quite bit of optimizing left to do. The real problem is that the system preference's options only allows for automatic switching or discrete only. What we need is an option for integrated only, so that we can have all-day battery life if we need it.
I'm also curious to find out, if there's a difference between the (real life, not on paper) power consumption of the 450 vs, 455 vs 460? I had completely maxed-out the configuration with the fastest i7, fastest GPU, 2TB, etc. Maybe that was a mistake...
Mine was doing it when switching users... no third party software involved here.
I had a bigger problem with the graphics card though. And it's the reason why I have returned the laptop: Battery life. 5-6 hours browsing the web and answering emails, doing nothing taxing? The battery of my four year old 13" beats that... PRAM Reset, SMC Reset - nothing helped. I then installed gfxCardStatus which tells you which of the GPUs is active. It showed that the MacBook Pro was constanly switching to the discrete GPU, even when just browsing the web. And that's precisely when the battery drained. I could literally watch the percentage dwindle when the discrete card was active.
It feels like an unfinished product to me, like Apple has a quite bit of optimizing left to do. The real problem is that the system preference's options only allows for automatic switching or discrete only. What we need is an option for integrated only, so that we can have all-day battery life if we need it.
I'm also curious to find out, if there's a difference between the (real life, not on paper) power consumption of the 450 vs, 455 vs 460? I had completely maxed-out the configuration with the fastest i7, fastest GPU, 2TB, etc. Maybe that was a mistake...
gfxCardStatus shows which processes use the GPU. Even if you switch intentionally to Discrete Only mode, gfsCardStatus will still show the dependencies, i.e. processes that use the GPU. If these processes are inaccessible to you, a bar genius might easily disable these for you. You can disable accessible ones in the Login Items pane in System Preferences / Users & Groups. I have Compressor installed for example, and at every startup (macOS Sierra) two Compressor daemons kick-in to switch the GPU to Discrete. When I have no pending Compressor jobs they go away in idle time and release the GPU. Yours may be something like that that doesn't go away. That for the GPU.
Then comes the screen brightness. The difference between 50% and 75% brightness may be almost half of the battery life. Photo and video editing may require full brightness as well as watching movies. Apple's battery life statements are based on 75% brightness according to footnotes. In all other cases half brightness is fairly enough, although this is a very subjective issue.
Ads and trackers may ruin your Safari life. Use an utility like Ghostery to filter out ad networks and trackers. At least give it a try to see how much useless and behind the scenes junk Javascript code is loaded on Safari when you click any link.
Then there is ongoing maintenance after every system update or the first time you use the computer. If iCloud is enabled a lot of iCloud work goes behind the scenes. Spotlight indexing may take even a few days in first setup. You have to wait at least one week before making any battery assumption.
And finally, Apple provides you with fairly accessible energy controls. The first one is the Battery status menu. It shows the Apps Using Significant Energy. Then there is Activity Monitor which gives you more granular information about all processes and their energy usage. With these tools you could easily deal with the panic attack that caused you to return your maxed-out computer. You've made no mistake in choosing the maxed-out one, feel free to buy it back without any hesitation.
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Hardware issues are generally not intermittent, or if they begin intermittently they become more and more frequent and consistent then eventually end up with total failure. There is no such a pattern in reported incidents. Anyway, not such that a big deal, if this is a hardware failure Apple will resolve that.
Same for a lot of people with self-destructing laptops from Apple and other brands. GPUs and laptop-sized computers/components are historically rife with "defects". Mostly the defect is in the engineering of these machines to be so small, with poor solutions for the heat they generate.
This is why I don't want an iMac or a MacBook at this point. I want a computer with replaceable components that is made for heavy work. But I'm not willing to keep using Windows and PCs (which have a slightly longer lifespan if you're really lucky, or can afford to keep replacing parts till you get a combination of things that work out for a few years with the compatibility and configuration options voodoo of PCs).
Without a business paying for my constant replacement of self-destructing computers and software subscription BS, I can't afford to buy anything at all nor do any real work. I stick with an obsolete set of computers for hobby and entertainment. I can't get a business started with my tiny amount of startup money that I'd have to repeatedly keep spending every few years as hardware self-destructs and software costs go up (looking at you, Adobe). I hate this industry. Being poor is quicksand in general, but being a person who's tools of trades are computers is even more difficult without income (i remember when digital art was supposed to be cost-effective, compared to using traditional media, ha ha ha). Yeah some people get by just fine with this world of hardware/software, but I've never been one of them and I know several artists who have suffered years of frustrations with the same crap who ended up barely scraping by or working other day-jobs instead of being able to afford life as digital artists with this abysmal technology that geeks are constantly praising as miraculous. Sure, we have incredible capabilities with these devices compared to a decade or more in the past, but the reliability has never become more than middling-to-abysmal. Middling-to-abysmal reliability has been normalized and any reasonable complaint is met with throngs of indoctrinated technogeeks bashing the complainers. Hypernormalisation instead of fixing problems. Yay humanity.
Because of a problem with iTunes I decided to wipe the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. It did not resolve the problem that prompted me to do it in the first place, but it DID clear up a problem with the cursor periodically disappearing. I can't imagine how they could be related, but it makes me wonder if decisions made during the unboxing/setup phase may affect the operation of the system.
I haven't seen the problem described in this article (2.9 i7, 460GPU), but I haven't used Photos or iMovie.
No such thing as perfect QA.
Guess who's still the best in the business, though.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/macbook-leads-reliability-customer-satisfaction/
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/12/02/macbooks-top-consumer-reports-reliability/
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/laptops/LaptopReliability
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2498302,00.asp
http://www.zdnet.com/article/consumer-reports-notebook-reliability-survey/
Just because your life is near perfect or you have a near perfect brain that can resolve all problems in your own life doesn't mean everyone else can be your clone. Have some sympathy. Stop adding woe to the existing woe of others. Stop trying to play lawyer or teacher. Encourage others and try to be friendly even when others don't reciprocate your goodness. Stop complaining about people complaining. If you read something you dislike, bite your tongue instead of clicking a Dislike or bashing that person. When a fellow Mac user needs to vent, be upbeat and supportive. Optimists make the world go 'round.
At least its fun to see where the threshold for putting up with shit is with even the most hardcore apple fans. In my years hanging in this forum its the first time there was a very negative tone towards apple. Let's hope apple gets the hint that the current generation of products are garbage, so that we can get back on track to awesome hardware deserving the "pro" badge.
In the meantime it's the first time since the switch to intel that I am warning friends, family, and business asking for advice away from apple.
They are as fast as 2008-2010 8-core Mac Pros while using 1/10th the power. Their laptop cooling was bad years ago and they have improved it considerably since then:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/172791,macbook-pro-helps-core-i7-hit-100-degrees.aspx
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/12
These graphics glitches can come from software issues like here (2014):
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/960399
or it can be hardware defects. Some Mac Pro owners had to have their AMD GPUs replaced:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/277/31810
Every manufacturer has a failure rate:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Failure-Rates-by-Generation-563/
AMD was noted there as having an increasing failure rate. There was the problem with the 2011 MBPs with AMD GPUs too. AMD isn't doing so well financially so they may be accepting poorer quality samples from their manufacturing partners to save money:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
"A notorious example of product binning happened in some AMD processors. Upon testing, certain AMD processors can be found with defective or sub-par cores present on the silicon. Instead of scrapping the whole processor, the defective core is simply disabled but left intact and the remaining silicon is marketed as a lower tier product."
All manufacturers do this and have acceptable quality thresholds, when a company is struggling financially, they will be more likely to lower the threshold. Apple mostly sells the entry model laptops with IGPs but say they sell 1 million MBPs with dGPUs per quarter, a dGPU failure rate of 1% means 10,000 MBP failures. It just takes a handful of people online with scrambled displays to make it seem like a widespread issue. Sometimes the defect rates are higher if there's a bad batch of GPUs but nobody can tell what the failure rate is from a handful of cases.
Apple's software should be better at handling GPU driver crashes. The driver shouldn't lock up the OS, it should drop to software mode like in safe mode and restart itself when it crashes or messes up, restart the job where it failed and provide a log of what happened.
If this turns out to be a hardware issue, while I can understand Apple wanting to help a long-term partner like AMD out, if it's going to mean a higher rate of defective parts, it would be better going with NVidia. These are expensive laptops and nobody wants to be dealing with years of graphics glitches like the 2011 models again. Hopefully it turns out to be software but if it is, they also need to be looking at why this software issue keeps cropping up every few years. This hardly ever happens with Intel's IGPs.
Please re-read it and tell me if there is something really tangible in there.
For example. Of the 58,000 subscribers that were quizzed, how many had Mac laptops? Of the rest, How many had comparable PC laptops? Could it be that a large part of the rest had low cost laptops (netbooks etc)?
What were they measuring exactly?
It just seems like pie in the sky.
Through experience I would say that you could easily find laptop brands/models that were on a par with Apple. Perhaps slightly better or slightly worse but comparing Apple with the entire PC industry would seem to away things in favour of Apple as in the opposing group you are including absolutely all the garbage that has come out over five years which is a segment that Apple just doesn't operate in.
I had a bigger problem with the graphics card though. And it's the reason why I have returned the laptop:
Battery life. 5-6 hours browsing the web and answering emails, doing nothing taxing? The battery of my four year old 13" beats that... PRAM Reset, SMC Reset - nothing helped. I then installed gfxCardStatus which tells you which of the GPUs is active. It showed that the MacBook Pro was constanly switching to the discrete GPU, even when just browsing the web. And that's precisely when the battery drained. I could literally watch the percentage dwindle when the discrete card was active.
It feels like an unfinished product to me, like Apple has a quite bit of optimizing left to do. The real problem is that the system preference's options only allows for automatic switching or discrete only. What we need is an option for integrated only, so that we can have all-day battery life if we need it.
I'm also curious to find out, if there's a difference between the (real life, not on paper) power consumption of the 450 vs, 455 vs 460? I had completely maxed-out the configuration with the fastest i7, fastest GPU, 2TB, etc. Maybe that was a mistake...
Then comes the screen brightness. The difference between 50% and 75% brightness may be almost half of the battery life. Photo and video editing may require full brightness as well as watching movies. Apple's battery life statements are based on 75% brightness according to footnotes. In all other cases half brightness is fairly enough, although this is a very subjective issue.
Ads and trackers may ruin your Safari life. Use an utility like Ghostery to filter out ad networks and trackers. At least give it a try to see how much useless and behind the scenes junk Javascript code is loaded on Safari when you click any link.
Then there is ongoing maintenance after every system update or the first time you use the computer. If iCloud is enabled a lot of iCloud work goes behind the scenes. Spotlight indexing may take even a few days in first setup. You have to wait at least one week before making any battery assumption.
And finally, Apple provides you with fairly accessible energy controls. The first one is the Battery status menu. It shows the Apps Using Significant Energy. Then there is Activity Monitor which gives you more granular information about all processes and their energy usage. With these tools you could easily deal with the panic attack that caused you to return your maxed-out computer. You've made no mistake in choosing the maxed-out one, feel free to buy it back without any hesitation.