Twitter reactions to Apple’s OS update

10.4.11 was smooth as glass – in fact, I downloaded it and installed with less than 50% battery capacity on wifi – no problems.

Killed my MacBook too.

Reinstalled it (without erasing) and everything is fine now. Really scared me anyway…

Glad to see I’m not the only one with this problem.

sorry – it was me copying windley. For me it didn’t necessarily die
on me but I get about 2 grey screens of death a day and even more
frequently my DNS craps out causing me to have to reboot to get it
to come back up

Maybe its a ploy to get people to upgrade to 10.5.

I cannot comment about 10.4.11, I moved both the MBP and G5 to 10.5 and subsequently 10.5.1. Neither have had any issues to speak of. Throughout the 10.4 life-cycle I never experienced an upgrade issue. Am I lucky?

I had no problems – except for GarageBand. Upgrading to iLife ’08.

The install of Leopard went smoothly, although it took a very long time, and the CD failed the Integrity Check the first time. HOWEVER, some of my apps are now broken, and I mean the latest versions of them. Biggest issues are gimp (crashes with ugly error messages while starting) and OpenOffice (opens slowly, OS X says it timed out, then voila! it opens, but it also seems a little flaky on some operations). So now I’m doing my graphics work back on the PC, which is ok except for the pain in the neck moving files around. The latest upgrade to 10.5.1 has not resolved these issues.

On the whole, the experience has been about the same as when I upgraded the PC from W2K to Win XP, which broke about the same number of apps, percentage-wise.

I admit I haven’t had the nerve to move to Vista, and I may never. It’s the reason I bought the Macbook instead of a new Windows-based laptop. Too many ugly stories about Vista from people I work with who did install Vista — and sfaik they installed it correctly; they aren’t screw-ups.

Huh…

Almost makes me GLAD that Apple officially end-of-life’ed Panther (just four years after releasing it), so it’ll get no further bug fixes or security updates. I’d hate my Panther install to get trashed.

Perhaps to add some support for the other side, my Leopard install has been flawless.

You’re not the only one. OSX is a disaster – see this:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1096520&tstart=0

I upgraded my Macbook and haven’t experienced any problems yet. I updated my Mac Mini to the latest Tiger and haven’t experienced any problems either.

As with any OS, there will be people with problems. I hardly would call OSX a disaster though (directed at #10 and his ridiculous statement).

So Robert, what’s your point? Yes, some are having some problems for who knows what reason, too many variables to know. What percentage is it in total? Is it a “real” problem or just that the vocal minority (twitter/blogs) are the ones you are paying attention to? 5 installs here and no glitches. 6 installs by my novice relatives and only one minor glitch. 6 friends with no glitches. I’m sorry Apple sucks for you but they’re golden for me.

PXLated: my point? Does a blogger need to have a point?

10.4.11 updated smoothly for me. Didn’t even unplug my Firewire drive. All is going fine on my 2002 G4 “Quicksilver” and always has, with the exception of the drive going bad after 4 years, but I just popped a new one in and, thanks to SuperDuper! and aforementioned external drive, no work time was lost.

I think the biggest issue is that these people saying they have issues often completely and utterly fail to describe their problems. “killed my Mac” is not descriptive. It doesn’t even begin to describe what the user observed. Did their mac catch on fire? Did it smoke? Did some major app fail to launch? Did it kernel panic?

There is no information made available to 1. Figure out what happened. 2. Reproduce it so others don’t have to suffer the problem. For example, you said your Mac kept saying it needed to be restarted. This is a kernel panic. These are logged to /Library/Logs/panic.log. They often contain a huge amount of information as to the cause of your problem.

There are many things that can cause a kernel panic. Such as bad third party drivers. Bad ram. Bad hardware. An incorrect install (such as pulling the plug with no battery or installing a fat 10.4 on a PPC because it seems “cool”). Hell, one of the most common reasons I’ve seen is people with bad USB hardware. They’ll have some cheap buggy USB speakers connected to a bad, unpowered USB hub. This is asking for a kernel panic. Or previous versions of Mac OS X may have accepted bad hardware by chance and allowed them to potentially corrupt data while the new versions of Mac OS X immediately call panic() when they see the bad hardware.

A great example is when Microsoft first announced Windows supported FireWire. Expect it really didn’t. It supported FireWire hardware from *one* vendor ID and refused to look at anything else. So all the other third party manufacturers (IHVs) pretended their FW hardware was also from that one vendor so Windows would load it. Because there was no way to uniquely identify this FW hardware from one IHV to another, there was no way to make software workarounds for hardware bugs. This led to a mass of buggy hardware that was poorly tested. When connecting some of these devices to a Mac, which actually supported FireWire, the system would immediately kernel panic due to buggy hardware.

Yes, I just blamed your kernel panic on Microsoft.

Robert, did the 10.4.11 update completely kill your machine? Or have you been able to backtrack to your previous install using a bootable backup from a tool like SuperDuper or something?

I haven’t run into the same kind of problem in my years of using Mac OS X, but I am paranoid that something like this will happen to me sometime. So I make nightly backups that would allow me to completely replace my system if it stopped working tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Apple has definitely dropped the ball by not working harder to fix these issues when people bring them to their attention. Especially when those people are prolific bloggers…

I had the same problem as Robert. As I recall, I booted from the disk and ran disk utility. Or maybe it was Disk Warrior. In any case, that solved it.

Think back a few years… if you were on OS9, you were wrestling with extension conflicts. If you were on a PC, you were dealing viruses, frequent crashes, conflicts. Both platforms have come a long way, but we’re not totally frictionless yet.

You complain that Apple advertises itself as better than PC for ease of use. Well, OSX is better, it’s just not perfect. I know now that I have Leopard installed and I don’t even have to worry about back-up anymore, my total maintenance time for my system will probably be a couple of hours per year. Not so long ago it was probably an hour a week.

No problems here. Everything worked perfectly. MBP 2,2 SR

Actually, Rosyna’s company, Unsanity, is responsible for most software problems on the Mac. Unsanity tampers with the System kernel, which is against Apple’s rules for third-party developers. Most problems upgrading to Leopard, including the so-called blue screen, have been caused by Unsanity installations that use APE (Application Enhancer). Other APE culprits are Audio Hijack and Logitech Mouse software. I would urge anyone using those products or anything from Unsanity to stop doing so.

Sure, if it means you don’t have to blame apple and apple is innocent in all this, blame us.

Taking one for the team; We’re used to it.

Rosyna, of course Apple is innocent in all of this. You said it yourself: kernel panics are Microsoft’s fault!

ordinal erased and restored? Why did he not archive and install – which would have cost him an hour at most?

Not that I am justifying the failure of the software to update properly, but it does seem rather like you are extrapolating from a very small vocal minority and giving the impression that this is exceptionally widespread.

Quick question though – how many people having problems are using APE (the cause of the Leopard failures) either directly or because Logictech (in their not so infinite wisdom) decided to ship it with their drivers?

Yes, we get it. Some people has problems with OS X and/or their Macintosh computers, whereas you have no problems with your Vaio. It might be a risky proposition, but I bet you that some Vaio owners have problems with their systems.