Can both of you please post your data so those of us with more than a handful of brain cells can pick through it and determine which of you may be right?
That's not to exclude you from the pool of people with more than a handful of brain cells but, rather, to point out that we're not likely to just take your word for it. Which you'd realize if those cells were present and functional, of course.
The problem is that most of the smart folks have already stopped. Those smart folks who didn't, you can identify by their children being smart enough to not give them grandkids. Of course, that just leaves the idiots reproducing, which was more or less your point; but let's take that to its ultimate conclusion.
A smart person is only going to have as many kids as they can support, realizing that part of that support involves leaving a livable planet for future generations. An idiot is going to pump out as many little idiots as possible because, hell, bigger welfare checks and more of a tax writeoff, amirite?
Once every idiot couple is popping out 4-8 idiot offspring, well, we're fucked.
But it's not PC to imply that procreation should to a privilege reserved for those who show a modicum of intelligence and restraint; and we've allowed the portion of the population which lacks both to grow to a level where... well, the rest of that thought is just to depressing to put into words, let's just say we're fucked and leave it at that.
I'm just glad I'll be dead by the time the shit hits the fan. My children won't suffer for the sins of my generation, because my children won't exist.
Seems to me we should turn down the CO2 a bit and crank up the particulates until we find some kind of balance.
This response is in no way intended to be serious, but maybe someone with a stronger foundation in these issues can take my attempt at humor and turn it into something useful.
Uhm... well... I think there's some merit to your plan, but you seem not to have thought it out quite far enough. That 40bn tons of CO2 was released in a single year; if your math is correct, your plan will take 4x as long to recapture it all; at which point, assuming the rate of release does not increase, we'll have released another 160bn tons, which will take 16 more years to recapture. Again, assuming your math was accurate.
And at the end of that 16 years, well, we'll have released another 640bn tons of CO2. Care to know how much more will be released in the 64 years that will take to recapture? 2.56 TRILLION tons. Of course, by then we're 84 years into the process and have increased our lifespan by 21; we'll have ~37 years left, of the 256 required to sequester all of the carbon that was released during the previous cycle.
I really wish I had better news for you. And I might, if I chose to check your math; you may well be severely overestimating the amount of carbon we could sequester in that manner. But I have better things to do with my time, like upgrading my computers and servers to newer, more power efficient hardware, and streamlining the software I run and (more importantly, as I can have the greatest impact here) create, introducing efficiency optimizations wherever possible in order to reduce processing requirements and, thus, the carbon footprint of the machines running said software.
That's what a lot of people really don't see: everyone, every job anyone does, has an impact on this problem. It's easy to say, as in my software example, "well, the processing power is there, we might as well use it" but, really, might we just as well not use it and, instead, let those increases in processing power let those systems sit idle (and consume less power for longer periods?
Might not we be better off turning these technological advances which enable a steady stream of ever-faster computers and mobile devices into a net energy savings, by striving to use as many or fewer (but not more) CPU cycles on the newer, faster, CPUs capable of more calculations per watt, rather than instead bloating our software so that the old devices become slow and obsolete and the new devices feel just as fast as the old ones used to?
Of course, that would mean devices would only be replaced when they actually wore out, which manufacturers would not like. The new shiny would still sell, of course; and the benefit would be longer battery life as, after a few generations, things would have already become fast enough that you wouldn't notice the difference even if you doubled the performance -- your old device and a brand new one with a faster CPU (which thus spent more time idle) would feel identical performance-wise, but the newer one, sitting idle more often, would consume less power.
But no, let's bloat, bloat, bloat.
Because cycles spent rendering a drop shadow or animating a window opening or closing have zero carbon footprint. Oh, there's no carbon footprint in all those devices we refurbish, recycle, or destroy each year, either, right? Nor in making the new ones to replace them? It's not just about the software; in fact, the software itself would have a negligible impact. It's about the hardware, and the ever increasing demands on said hardware which cause it to become obsolete way too fast.
Then we can get on about transportation and agriculture. But a whole lot of transportation is just moving raw materials to make more devices, moving devices to warehouses, then to stores, then to homes, then to landfills. And a whole lot of agriculture is just growing corn for ethanol to enable much of that transportation. A lot of oil consumption is for that transportation, as well; not to mention all of the plastics used in these devices, as well as their retail packaging and shipping materials.
In all seriousness, I had started this tirade about the carbon footprint of inefficient software as somewhat of a troll but, the more I go on, the more I think there might actually be something to it.
Ah, but did Chrome slow down in that period? The assumption you're making is that I don't use both (as a web developer, I use them all, so your assumption is actually incorrect). And the answer is no, Chrome did not slow down in that period.
Low sales should be acceptable for a niche device with a high markup, though. If anything, as long as they weren't taking a loss on those lines (and I can almost assure you they were not) they serve as marketing by attracting the kind of people who will ultimately make company-wide purchasing decisions for fortune 500 companies. It never hurts for your company's name to be the answer to the question "Which one vendor can sell us our low- and high-end desktops and workstations, our general use laptops and ultraportables, our mobile workstations, our servers, and our backup and device management solutions, all in one stop?" Bonus points if the answer to "Oh, and can they sell us phones and tablets, too?" is "Yes." But, the bonus round only matters if you get there...
What matters is that it is faster than Firefox 56.
That's what they're really saying. In fact, they literally said that. And you literally quoted it. I was merely pointing out that FF 57 being faster than Chrome means it's also faster than FF 56...
Well, if FF 56 was slower than Chrome and FF 57 is faster than Chrome... I'm assuming you learned about the transitive property at some point and can deduce my point from there.
Do you see the issue on all of your macs or just the one?
Just the one. The IDE is installed on all, Git is installed on all, and neither of those run as services. For reference, I run the same IDE (and Git, for that matter) on Windows and Ubuntu and it causes no issues on those platforms either. Safe to say both can be ruled out, especially given that they didn't cause issues under Mountain Lion on the 2011. A friend of mine with the same model (minus the dGPU) has the same issues, mind you, and he's not a developer and does not run an IDE, nor Git, so that further points to an issue with this model of Mac.
Not even Apple marketing has ever made the claim that _no_ Mac malware exists.
Let's be honest, here. What, exactly, do you think the lay consumer gets from "Macs don't get PC viruses"? That might not literally be what they're saying, but they absolutely have to know that's what people are getting from it and, well, it's dangerous. It's so very dangerous, because it leads to people thinking they don't need protection and they can click on every link under the sun because they truly believe "Macs don't have those problems".
When you're marketing your product as being so simple to use that you don't have to be a computer genius to use it ("Just Works"), you have to expect that a large enough subset of your customers won't understand the difference between malware (the broader category) and a virus (a subset of malware), let alone the difference between a PC virus and a Mac virus. That means Apple's marketing is either incompetent (they don't realize that people will misunderstand the message) or malicious (they don't care that people will misunderstand the message). Which is it?
When Apple takes it on the chin over little stuff, there really and truly is a good reason for it. They've postured themselves to be an easy target through years of marketing their product as the safe solution for the average (e.g. less-knowledgeable) user, so any flaw in their system that pokes a hole in that becomes easy fodder for the haters. You see the same thing with Linux, in all honesty, but it takes a bit more to mount a legitimate attack against Microsoft because they (eventually) owned their reputation as vendors of a vulnerable platform and have been working somewhat diligently to correct course -- Windows is no longer the easy target for criticism that it once was. They still have a long road ahead (dropping mandatory telemetry and instituting a feature freeze would more or less remove the remaining targets on their collective backs), and it may well be too late for them at this point, but they're not the easy target they once were; Apple has taken that title, for now.
Remember, there was a day when bashing Microsoft was the "in" thing, and that day was not long ago.
Why not shut spotlight down or limit it through settings>Spotlight>Search results/Privacy? If it's _that_ bad it's what I'd do.
Been there, done that. I don't use Apple Mail or any of the apps it wanted to index, so of course I turned those off; same for iCloud. I do use spotlight, so shutting it down entirely would not be an option.
You _have_ attempted to see if a clean install (with no apps/files copied over) has the same issues?
Well, then the 2011's GPU died, and I couldn't get it to boot into a usable state to get files off of it (I did eventually pull the drive and get at the files before wiping the drive and installing Ubuntu on it) and I ran out and bought this machine, that's how I started with this machine. I expected indexing and whatnot for a couple of days, especially given that I the first thing I did was install my IDE (fresh copy downloaded form the vendor) and clone the rather large Git repo I was working on; I also expected that to die down within a week and it did not.
I don't think you get much cleaner of an install than a freshly opened box. This has been an issue from day 1.
Further tests by manually adding in your files and then apps gradually?
Indeed, as explained above I didn't immediately pull the drive from the 2011; I installed just what was needed for my work. When I did pull the drive, a couple weeks later, I used it as an external (USB) drive for a while to get a feel for what I might actually need off that drive and was very selective in what I kept.
Are you sufficiently technical to use dtrace?
Given the nature of my work, I should hope so. Given the fact that I needed a system I could do actual work on and not a full-time maintenance job, the Mac became a secondary machine by the time I might have cared to dig that far into it.
Have you attempted to reset the SMC? Some weird problems can be SMC related.
Given how you are seeing strange issues I begin to wonder if you might have a problem with stowaways.
You mean malware? That thing we've been told over and over doesn't exist on Macs? I'd find it quite ironic if that were the case, given that I have a security background myself and have never had an issue with it on Windows, despite that platform's reputation. That said, I have never seen any odd processes running and rkhunter and clam both report a clean system. I ditched clam and ran WebRoot for a while but it caused its own issues -- but also reported a clean system.
If, by stowaways, you mean holdovers and cruft from a prior OS installation, unless it came that way from the factory we can rule that out right out of the gate. I haven't upgraded this machine past Yosemite, which was the current version when the machine fell out of daily use; and I had these same issues on Mavericks, which the machine shipped with. Yosemite was a clean install, as well.
I'm about to repurpose this machine, so it may see High Sierra (also as a clean install) soon. We'll see if that fixes things, but I won't hold my breath.
Instead of going to Ars, reading for yourself the difference in tone/content and judging for yourself
What makes you think I haven't? It's possible that we simply disagree on this matter. In fact, that's the reality.
one or two have shrink tube thermoplastic I added to protect the flaking cords
Oh god, the flaking cords. I always forget about those unless I have my charger plugged in... They need to fix that issue, seriously; I think most of us would accept a slight change in the texture of the cord if it meant not having to replace it in less than 2 years. With 3 Mac laptops in the house, I'm replacing one every 9 months or so.
I'll say, though, the original charger that came with that 2011 MBP never flaked -- my wife managed to snag and cut it 3 separate times, though, which did ultimately shorten the life of the puck, which died silently in the middle of my workday in the middle of 2014. The battery life of that machine meant I was able to finish my workday before going out to buy a replacement, which flaked apart within 6 months. I'd probably still be using the original power supply today had my wife not shorted it out 3 times.
Those are the kind of changes I'm talking about -- subtle "this is better" changes that are actually worse in the long run; like the charger cords being wrapped in a material that feels better when new, but flaking off within a year or two.
Apple's excuse the first time is that it's caused by frequent bending. Okay, well, I was using the same power cord at home and at work (this is before I worked from home) and I was coiling that fucker up at least twice a day, so... why did it only fail right at the plug? That part never got bent as tightly as the rest of the cable.
Next up, it's caused by the oils in your skin and by being pulled on. Okay, no, not buying that excuse, as I pull it out by the metal body precisely because I was taught by my engineer father that strain reliefs are intended to protect cables from accidental pulling and bending forces, not mistreatment. Not that I'd call what's on these a "strain relief". But whatever, if that's what they want to blame it on, maybe I'm not always doing that like I think I am, I'll roll with it, even though I handle the rest of the cable much more often (when wrapping and unwrapping it) and it still only frayed at the plug.
But, then: It's caused by heat. That's the last thing apple said to me about it. Heat. Think about that! What source of heat would affect only the plug end of the charging cable? Enough that it would become brown and brittle, mind you. Well, there's wither the laptop itself (and I've never had my charging port get hot that I've noticed -- not like the bottom of the damn thing under load), an internal short in the cable, or the wire being too thin for the current it's carrying. But still, the failure is always around that plug.
I'm sorry, Apple, but your older chargers didn't do this. Maybe go back to making them out of whatever those were made of?
Oh, and if you wanted 2 gigabit ethernet ports on a 2011 MBP, you'd only need 1 dongle. Those had 2 Lightning ports and gigabit ethernet so, really, you could have 3 if you wanted. Honestly, if they added Thunderbolt pass-thru to them, you could add 18 to each machine (9 per port, accounting for overhead); 38 if the dongles support Thunderbolt 2. Which still gives the 2011 model one more than the 2012.
That's not a nit-pick to say the 2011 was better, just that your perception that the 2012 is better because you were able to give it 2 is, well, a bit silly. Just like a laptop with 38 (eh, 39) Ethernet ports would be.
I'll admit that I wasn't really a Mac guy until 2010, but I know plenty of people who have been their whole lives (or, at least, since the Mac came out) and I've used enough of them prior to that to be able to say with some certainty that the guy you just replied to is one of the haters you speak of. My whole point here, though, is that not all dissent is hate; mine certainly is not.
I saw the Mac as something better in 2010. That perception has faded a bit more each year since Lion came out. That's not because I hate, or even dislike, Apple; or do you think I want to know I spent $2500 on what, ultimately, ended up being my knock-around laptop? No, I want to see them turn around and get back to the level of stability, reliability, and usability they had achieved in 2010, back when the Mac I was using actually felt faster than my PC despite being built of slower stuff. Now? A Mac feels markedly slower than a PC built of similar hardware, and it's down to the amount of bloat that's been added to the OS since 2010
Apple refuses to sell me, at any price, a Mac fast enough to match my recent $4000 PC build. A native UNIX environment without giving up the ability to run industry-standard apps I need to be able to run natively, now that's worth at least another $4000 to me on the right hardware. On anything less, the performance would roughly match Bash on Windows on my recent build -- and the only time I deal with that level of performance on Windows is when I'm using Bash.
Mind you, and I repeat myself, this wasn't an issue in 2010; sure, they were still selling last year's CPUs and even older GPUs, but the OS was actually more efficient, so it really didn't matter. We didn't see Spotlight consistently using 5-10% of a CPU core despite no indexed part of the filesystem having changed in days; we didn't have powerd -- the power management service intended to increase battery life without impacting performance -- eating a while core (or two) at idle and killing both aspects of the machine it was supposed to be protecting, not to mention burning my fucking leg; and I'll be damned, but I never saw kernel_task baloon into a multi-gigabyte memory hog and slowly ramp up its CPU usage until the only way to achieve the advertised battery life at idle was to make sure you remembered to reboot weekly to fix that bullshit. I don't reboot my Windows machines weekly, and I've never had to; it wouldn't be such a big deal on my Mac if Apple didn't tout how infrequently they need to be rebooted (with the hidden disclaimer: "for updates").
Apple is a company on the decline, they're just up high enough that yo ucan't see them from the ground and neither you, nor they, have noticed yet. Dissent at this stage is an attempt at prodding them into course-correcting before they fall low enough to notice... because, at that point, they'll have picked up too much momentum to maneuver.
Many of the haters, regardless of their intent, are doing Apple and their fans a huge favor, as well; the sooner Apple stops giving them such low-hanging fruit to attack, the sooner your experience, as an Apple user, improves. Thank them.
If you say so. As I type this on my 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, I look back at how OS X improved with every release prior to Lion and how it's been downhill since then. I look over at my 2011 17" MacBook Pro and contemplate whether I'd have been better off taking Apple up on their offer of extended warranty for the failed GPU, or is installing Ubuntu on it was the right choice; it does run Ubuntu quite nicely, so I think I chose correctly, but I still wonder sometimes. I look at my wife's 2012 13" MacBook Pro and 2016 5k iMac and am happy I was able to buy her the machines she wanted, rather than making her settle for less. She's on her iPhone 6s right now, having owned every model since the 3g until the 7 came out. I wonder where my iPod classic and Mini are and what music I last synched to them. I just took a break from writing this to pick up the iPad Air I use in the living room to control my Chromecast (I have an Aple TV but this is one thing Apple just never got right, so I don't use it) and change to a different show. I haven't quite neared the end of the list of Apple devices I own.
Do we think that the average end-user will know how to (or even *care to*) update their phone?
Doesn't matter. The same techy friend or relative that handles their computer will handle their phone, just as is the case now if they're lucky enough to ever see an update. The difference is: that friend or relative will actually have updates to install, like with their computer.
A walled garden is never a free market, my friend. The hardware itself may be "free market", but then you're tied into Apple's tightly-controlled market. That's a far cry from doing the "free market thing".
I think you mean FaceID, FaceTime is Apple's video chat service. It's kind of hard to take you seriously when you can't even bother to look like you know what you're talking about.
Apple's advantage used to be that these issues, no matter how small and seemingly meaningless they may be, simply did not exist. That has been less and less the case each year since Jobs died, yet Apple still markets themselves as though it is an absolute truth.
Don't you think that might be why Apple gets shit on for things like this while it takes much more serious infractions for Microsoft to get a good blasting (and they do get blasted quite often, as well -- and a different subset of people like you come out of the woodwork to point out how "Apple never gets shit on here the way Microsoft does, look at all these haters", when the reality is that both get it when deserved).
It's not the issues themselves that people are bitching about, it's that Apple presents themselves as flawless. At one time, they were close enough to get away with the claim, but they're slipping and that is no longer the case. Most of us who bother to speak on the matter are anything but haters: we see them slipping and are speaking up with hope in our hearts that they may correct course. In a way, those of us who are speaking up are bigger fanbois than those of who who defend them.
Or, you know, it could be literally decades of Apple marketing to perfectionists. You can't market to perfectionists, build a userbase of perfectionists, and be surprised when every flaw is pointed out when you start slipping.
I'll tender my vote for this, as well. A Galaxy Note with slide out keyboard would be the shit -- and bonus points if they give us screen tilt, as well, so the phone can act as its own stand. They would rule the business traveler market with that, as a machine you can perhaps get actual work done on while on a plane, or just prop it up on its own keyboard and watch a movie.
They hadn't gotten really bad yet in 2010. There are a large number of us who believe they peaked in 2011, for example. Snow Leopard is still, IMHO, the best release of OS X as far as features and stability are concerned, the last release where everything truly "just worked". It was mid 2011 when Lion came out that they really started to slide. Dropping 17" MBPs wasn't a good sign, either.
The "bugs" are almost all sufficiently minor to not bother people without OCD issues.
From a brand that used to pride itself on impeccable visual design, that's actually quite sad. From Microsoft, or even most Android manufacturers, it wouldn't be such a big deal, because that level of visual perfection was never their thing and they never attracted those OCD users in the first place like Apple did.
Apple spent years cultivating the following of these people, now they're seeing what happens when you trigger them.
Slashdot Mirror
Can both of you please post your data so those of us with more than a handful of brain cells can pick through it and determine which of you may be right?
That's not to exclude you from the pool of people with more than a handful of brain cells but, rather, to point out that we're not likely to just take your word for it. Which you'd realize if those cells were present and functional, of course.
The problem is that most of the smart folks have already stopped. Those smart folks who didn't, you can identify by their children being smart enough to not give them grandkids. Of course, that just leaves the idiots reproducing, which was more or less your point; but let's take that to its ultimate conclusion.
A smart person is only going to have as many kids as they can support, realizing that part of that support involves leaving a livable planet for future generations. An idiot is going to pump out as many little idiots as possible because, hell, bigger welfare checks and more of a tax writeoff, amirite?
Once every idiot couple is popping out 4-8 idiot offspring, well, we're fucked.
But it's not PC to imply that procreation should to a privilege reserved for those who show a modicum of intelligence and restraint; and we've allowed the portion of the population which lacks both to grow to a level where... well, the rest of that thought is just to depressing to put into words, let's just say we're fucked and leave it at that.
I'm just glad I'll be dead by the time the shit hits the fan. My children won't suffer for the sins of my generation, because my children won't exist.
Seems to me we should turn down the CO2 a bit and crank up the particulates until we find some kind of balance.
This response is in no way intended to be serious, but maybe someone with a stronger foundation in these issues can take my attempt at humor and turn it into something useful.
Uhm... well... I think there's some merit to your plan, but you seem not to have thought it out quite far enough. That 40bn tons of CO2 was released in a single year; if your math is correct, your plan will take 4x as long to recapture it all; at which point, assuming the rate of release does not increase, we'll have released another 160bn tons, which will take 16 more years to recapture. Again, assuming your math was accurate.
And at the end of that 16 years, well, we'll have released another 640bn tons of CO2. Care to know how much more will be released in the 64 years that will take to recapture? 2.56 TRILLION tons. Of course, by then we're 84 years into the process and have increased our lifespan by 21; we'll have ~37 years left, of the 256 required to sequester all of the carbon that was released during the previous cycle.
I really wish I had better news for you. And I might, if I chose to check your math; you may well be severely overestimating the amount of carbon we could sequester in that manner. But I have better things to do with my time, like upgrading my computers and servers to newer, more power efficient hardware, and streamlining the software I run and (more importantly, as I can have the greatest impact here) create, introducing efficiency optimizations wherever possible in order to reduce processing requirements and, thus, the carbon footprint of the machines running said software.
That's what a lot of people really don't see: everyone, every job anyone does, has an impact on this problem. It's easy to say, as in my software example, "well, the processing power is there, we might as well use it" but, really, might we just as well not use it and, instead, let those increases in processing power let those systems sit idle (and consume less power for longer periods?
Might not we be better off turning these technological advances which enable a steady stream of ever-faster computers and mobile devices into a net energy savings, by striving to use as many or fewer (but not more) CPU cycles on the newer, faster, CPUs capable of more calculations per watt, rather than instead bloating our software so that the old devices become slow and obsolete and the new devices feel just as fast as the old ones used to?
Of course, that would mean devices would only be replaced when they actually wore out, which manufacturers would not like. The new shiny would still sell, of course; and the benefit would be longer battery life as, after a few generations, things would have already become fast enough that you wouldn't notice the difference even if you doubled the performance -- your old device and a brand new one with a faster CPU (which thus spent more time idle) would feel identical performance-wise, but the newer one, sitting idle more often, would consume less power.
But no, let's bloat, bloat, bloat.
Because cycles spent rendering a drop shadow or animating a window opening or closing have zero carbon footprint. Oh, there's no carbon footprint in all those devices we refurbish, recycle, or destroy each year, either, right? Nor in making the new ones to replace them? It's not just about the software; in fact, the software itself would have a negligible impact. It's about the hardware, and the ever increasing demands on said hardware which cause it to become obsolete way too fast.
Then we can get on about transportation and agriculture. But a whole lot of transportation is just moving raw materials to make more devices, moving devices to warehouses, then to stores, then to homes, then to landfills. And a whole lot of agriculture is just growing corn for ethanol to enable much of that transportation. A lot of oil consumption is for that transportation, as well; not to mention all of the plastics used in these devices, as well as their retail packaging and shipping materials.
In all seriousness, I had started this tirade about the carbon footprint of inefficient software as somewhat of a troll but, the more I go on, the more I think there might actually be something to it.
Ah, but did Chrome slow down in that period? The assumption you're making is that I don't use both (as a web developer, I use them all, so your assumption is actually incorrect). And the answer is no, Chrome did not slow down in that period.
Low sales should be acceptable for a niche device with a high markup, though. If anything, as long as they weren't taking a loss on those lines (and I can almost assure you they were not) they serve as marketing by attracting the kind of people who will ultimately make company-wide purchasing decisions for fortune 500 companies. It never hurts for your company's name to be the answer to the question "Which one vendor can sell us our low- and high-end desktops and workstations, our general use laptops and ultraportables, our mobile workstations, our servers, and our backup and device management solutions, all in one stop?" Bonus points if the answer to "Oh, and can they sell us phones and tablets, too?" is "Yes." But, the bonus round only matters if you get there...
What matters is that it is faster than Firefox 56.
That's what they're really saying. In fact, they literally said that. And you literally quoted it. I was merely pointing out that FF 57 being faster than Chrome means it's also faster than FF 56...
...which they said matters.
Doesn't matter if you're using it from within Chrome.
Well, if FF 56 was slower than Chrome and FF 57 is faster than Chrome... I'm assuming you learned about the transitive property at some point and can deduce my point from there.
Do you see the issue on all of your macs or just the one?
Just the one. The IDE is installed on all, Git is installed on all, and neither of those run as services. For reference, I run the same IDE (and Git, for that matter) on Windows and Ubuntu and it causes no issues on those platforms either. Safe to say both can be ruled out, especially given that they didn't cause issues under Mountain Lion on the 2011. A friend of mine with the same model (minus the dGPU) has the same issues, mind you, and he's not a developer and does not run an IDE, nor Git, so that further points to an issue with this model of Mac.
Not even Apple marketing has ever made the claim that _no_ Mac malware exists.
Let's be honest, here. What, exactly, do you think the lay consumer gets from "Macs don't get PC viruses"? That might not literally be what they're saying, but they absolutely have to know that's what people are getting from it and, well, it's dangerous. It's so very dangerous, because it leads to people thinking they don't need protection and they can click on every link under the sun because they truly believe "Macs don't have those problems".
When you're marketing your product as being so simple to use that you don't have to be a computer genius to use it ("Just Works"), you have to expect that a large enough subset of your customers won't understand the difference between malware (the broader category) and a virus (a subset of malware), let alone the difference between a PC virus and a Mac virus. That means Apple's marketing is either incompetent (they don't realize that people will misunderstand the message) or malicious (they don't care that people will misunderstand the message). Which is it?
When Apple takes it on the chin over little stuff, there really and truly is a good reason for it. They've postured themselves to be an easy target through years of marketing their product as the safe solution for the average (e.g. less-knowledgeable) user, so any flaw in their system that pokes a hole in that becomes easy fodder for the haters. You see the same thing with Linux, in all honesty, but it takes a bit more to mount a legitimate attack against Microsoft because they (eventually) owned their reputation as vendors of a vulnerable platform and have been working somewhat diligently to correct course -- Windows is no longer the easy target for criticism that it once was. They still have a long road ahead (dropping mandatory telemetry and instituting a feature freeze would more or less remove the remaining targets on their collective backs), and it may well be too late for them at this point, but they're not the easy target they once were; Apple has taken that title, for now.
Remember, there was a day when bashing Microsoft was the "in" thing, and that day was not long ago.
Why not shut spotlight down or limit it through settings>Spotlight>Search results/Privacy? If it's _that_ bad it's what I'd do.
Been there, done that. I don't use Apple Mail or any of the apps it wanted to index, so of course I turned those off; same for iCloud. I do use spotlight, so shutting it down entirely would not be an option.
You _have_ attempted to see if a clean install (with no apps/files copied over) has the same issues?
Well, then the 2011's GPU died, and I couldn't get it to boot into a usable state to get files off of it (I did eventually pull the drive and get at the files before wiping the drive and installing Ubuntu on it) and I ran out and bought this machine, that's how I started with this machine. I expected indexing and whatnot for a couple of days, especially given that I the first thing I did was install my IDE (fresh copy downloaded form the vendor) and clone the rather large Git repo I was working on; I also expected that to die down within a week and it did not.
I don't think you get much cleaner of an install than a freshly opened box. This has been an issue from day 1.
Further tests by manually adding in your files and then apps gradually?
Indeed, as explained above I didn't immediately pull the drive from the 2011; I installed just what was needed for my work. When I did pull the drive, a couple weeks later, I used it as an external (USB) drive for a while to get a feel for what I might actually need off that drive and was very selective in what I kept.
Are you sufficiently technical to use dtrace?
Given the nature of my work, I should hope so. Given the fact that I needed a system I could do actual work on and not a full-time maintenance job, the Mac became a secondary machine by the time I might have cared to dig that far into it.
Have you attempted to reset the SMC? Some weird problems can be SMC related.
SMC and PRAM both, for unrelated issues.
As for the powerd issue, well, I'm not the only one seeing it. In fact, a lot of people are. Likewise for the issue and kernel_task RAM and CPU usage.
Given how you are seeing strange issues I begin to wonder if you might have a problem with stowaways.
You mean malware? That thing we've been told over and over doesn't exist on Macs? I'd find it quite ironic if that were the case, given that I have a security background myself and have never had an issue with it on Windows, despite that platform's reputation. That said, I have never seen any odd processes running and rkhunter and clam both report a clean system. I ditched clam and ran WebRoot for a while but it caused its own issues -- but also reported a clean system.
If, by stowaways, you mean holdovers and cruft from a prior OS installation, unless it came that way from the factory we can rule that out right out of the gate. I haven't upgraded this machine past Yosemite, which was the current version when the machine fell out of daily use; and I had these same issues on Mavericks, which the machine shipped with. Yosemite was a clean install, as well.
I'm about to repurpose this machine, so it may see High Sierra (also as a clean install) soon. We'll see if that fixes things, but I won't hold my breath.
Instead of going to Ars, reading for yourself the difference in tone/content and judging for yourself
What makes you think I haven't? It's possible that we simply disagree on this matter. In fact, that's the reality.
one or two have shrink tube thermoplastic I added to protect the flaking cords
Oh god, the flaking cords. I always forget about those unless I have my charger plugged in... They need to fix that issue, seriously; I think most of us would accept a slight change in the texture of the cord if it meant not having to replace it in less than 2 years. With 3 Mac laptops in the house, I'm replacing one every 9 months or so.
I'll say, though, the original charger that came with that 2011 MBP never flaked -- my wife managed to snag and cut it 3 separate times, though, which did ultimately shorten the life of the puck, which died silently in the middle of my workday in the middle of 2014. The battery life of that machine meant I was able to finish my workday before going out to buy a replacement, which flaked apart within 6 months. I'd probably still be using the original power supply today had my wife not shorted it out 3 times.
Those are the kind of changes I'm talking about -- subtle "this is better" changes that are actually worse in the long run; like the charger cords being wrapped in a material that feels better when new, but flaking off within a year or two.
Apple's excuse the first time is that it's caused by frequent bending. Okay, well, I was using the same power cord at home and at work (this is before I worked from home) and I was coiling that fucker up at least twice a day, so... why did it only fail right at the plug? That part never got bent as tightly as the rest of the cable.
Next up, it's caused by the oils in your skin and by being pulled on. Okay, no, not buying that excuse, as I pull it out by the metal body precisely because I was taught by my engineer father that strain reliefs are intended to protect cables from accidental pulling and bending forces, not mistreatment. Not that I'd call what's on these a "strain relief". But whatever, if that's what they want to blame it on, maybe I'm not always doing that like I think I am, I'll roll with it, even though I handle the rest of the cable much more often (when wrapping and unwrapping it) and it still only frayed at the plug.
But, then: It's caused by heat. That's the last thing apple said to me about it. Heat. Think about that! What source of heat would affect only the plug end of the charging cable? Enough that it would become brown and brittle, mind you. Well, there's wither the laptop itself (and I've never had my charging port get hot that I've noticed -- not like the bottom of the damn thing under load), an internal short in the cable, or the wire being too thin for the current it's carrying. But still, the failure is always around that plug.
I'm sorry, Apple, but your older chargers didn't do this. Maybe go back to making them out of whatever those were made of?
Oh, and if you wanted 2 gigabit ethernet ports on a 2011 MBP, you'd only need 1 dongle. Those had 2 Lightning ports and gigabit ethernet so, really, you could have 3 if you wanted. Honestly, if they added Thunderbolt pass-thru to them, you could add 18 to each machine (9 per port, accounting for overhead); 38 if the dongles support Thunderbolt 2. Which still gives the 2011 model one more than the 2012.
That's not a nit-pick to say the 2011 was better, just that your perception that the 2012 is better because you were able to give it 2 is, well, a bit silly. Just like a laptop with 38 (eh, 39) Ethernet ports would be.
I'll admit that I wasn't really a Mac guy until 2010, but I know plenty of people who have been their whole lives (or, at least, since the Mac came out) and I've used enough of them prior to that to be able to say with some certainty that the guy you just replied to is one of the haters you speak of. My whole point here, though, is that not all dissent is hate; mine certainly is not.
I saw the Mac as something better in 2010. That perception has faded a bit more each year since Lion came out. That's not because I hate, or even dislike, Apple; or do you think I want to know I spent $2500 on what, ultimately, ended up being my knock-around laptop? No, I want to see them turn around and get back to the level of stability, reliability, and usability they had achieved in 2010, back when the Mac I was using actually felt faster than my PC despite being built of slower stuff. Now? A Mac feels markedly slower than a PC built of similar hardware, and it's down to the amount of bloat that's been added to the OS since 2010
Apple refuses to sell me, at any price, a Mac fast enough to match my recent $4000 PC build. A native UNIX environment without giving up the ability to run industry-standard apps I need to be able to run natively, now that's worth at least another $4000 to me on the right hardware. On anything less, the performance would roughly match Bash on Windows on my recent build -- and the only time I deal with that level of performance on Windows is when I'm using Bash.
Mind you, and I repeat myself, this wasn't an issue in 2010; sure, they were still selling last year's CPUs and even older GPUs, but the OS was actually more efficient, so it really didn't matter. We didn't see Spotlight consistently using 5-10% of a CPU core despite no indexed part of the filesystem having changed in days; we didn't have powerd -- the power management service intended to increase battery life without impacting performance -- eating a while core (or two) at idle and killing both aspects of the machine it was supposed to be protecting, not to mention burning my fucking leg; and I'll be damned, but I never saw kernel_task baloon into a multi-gigabyte memory hog and slowly ramp up its CPU usage until the only way to achieve the advertised battery life at idle was to make sure you remembered to reboot weekly to fix that bullshit. I don't reboot my Windows machines weekly, and I've never had to; it wouldn't be such a big deal on my Mac if Apple didn't tout how infrequently they need to be rebooted (with the hidden disclaimer: "for updates").
Apple is a company on the decline, they're just up high enough that yo ucan't see them from the ground and neither you, nor they, have noticed yet. Dissent at this stage is an attempt at prodding them into course-correcting before they fall low enough to notice... because, at that point, they'll have picked up too much momentum to maneuver.
Many of the haters, regardless of their intent, are doing Apple and their fans a huge favor, as well; the sooner Apple stops giving them such low-hanging fruit to attack, the sooner your experience, as an Apple user, improves. Thank them.
If you say so. As I type this on my 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, I look back at how OS X improved with every release prior to Lion and how it's been downhill since then. I look over at my 2011 17" MacBook Pro and contemplate whether I'd have been better off taking Apple up on their offer of extended warranty for the failed GPU, or is installing Ubuntu on it was the right choice; it does run Ubuntu quite nicely, so I think I chose correctly, but I still wonder sometimes. I look at my wife's 2012 13" MacBook Pro and 2016 5k iMac and am happy I was able to buy her the machines she wanted, rather than making her settle for less. She's on her iPhone 6s right now, having owned every model since the 3g until the 7 came out. I wonder where my iPod classic and Mini are and what music I last synched to them. I just took a break from writing this to pick up the iPad Air I use in the living room to control my Chromecast (I have an Aple TV but this is one thing Apple just never got right, so I don't use it) and change to a different show. I haven't quite neared the end of the list of Apple devices I own.
Yet here I am dissenting.
I must be one of those haters. Right?
Do we think that the average end-user will know how to (or even *care to*) update their phone?
Doesn't matter. The same techy friend or relative that handles their computer will handle their phone, just as is the case now if they're lucky enough to ever see an update. The difference is: that friend or relative will actually have updates to install, like with their computer.
iPhone... free market... right.
A walled garden is never a free market, my friend. The hardware itself may be "free market", but then you're tied into Apple's tightly-controlled market. That's a far cry from doing the "free market thing".
Just in case you weren't aware, I actually used that correctly.
I think you mean FaceID, FaceTime is Apple's video chat service. It's kind of hard to take you seriously when you can't even bother to look like you know what you're talking about.
Apple's advantage used to be that these issues, no matter how small and seemingly meaningless they may be, simply did not exist. That has been less and less the case each year since Jobs died, yet Apple still markets themselves as though it is an absolute truth.
Don't you think that might be why Apple gets shit on for things like this while it takes much more serious infractions for Microsoft to get a good blasting (and they do get blasted quite often, as well -- and a different subset of people like you come out of the woodwork to point out how "Apple never gets shit on here the way Microsoft does, look at all these haters", when the reality is that both get it when deserved).
It's not the issues themselves that people are bitching about, it's that Apple presents themselves as flawless. At one time, they were close enough to get away with the claim, but they're slipping and that is no longer the case. Most of us who bother to speak on the matter are anything but haters: we see them slipping and are speaking up with hope in our hearts that they may correct course. In a way, those of us who are speaking up are bigger fanbois than those of who who defend them.
"used to"
If you think I was defending Apple, I think you missed my point.
The swipe-up panel is terrible.
And I really wonder how that works with the iPhone X's "swipe up for home"... but that's not an iOS 11 issue, so...
Or, you know, it could be literally decades of Apple marketing to perfectionists. You can't market to perfectionists, build a userbase of perfectionists, and be surprised when every flaw is pointed out when you start slipping.
I'll tender my vote for this, as well. A Galaxy Note with slide out keyboard would be the shit -- and bonus points if they give us screen tilt, as well, so the phone can act as its own stand. They would rule the business traveler market with that, as a machine you can perhaps get actual work done on while on a plane, or just prop it up on its own keyboard and watch a movie.
They hadn't gotten really bad yet in 2010. There are a large number of us who believe they peaked in 2011, for example. Snow Leopard is still, IMHO, the best release of OS X as far as features and stability are concerned, the last release where everything truly "just worked". It was mid 2011 when Lion came out that they really started to slide. Dropping 17" MBPs wasn't a good sign, either.
The "bugs" are almost all sufficiently minor to not bother people without OCD issues.
From a brand that used to pride itself on impeccable visual design, that's actually quite sad. From Microsoft, or even most Android manufacturers, it wouldn't be such a big deal, because that level of visual perfection was never their thing and they never attracted those OCD users in the first place like Apple did.
Apple spent years cultivating the following of these people, now they're seeing what happens when you trigger them.