> This is the buggiest thing I EVER had. Even the screenshot doesn't work properly. It reacts to(CmdShift-4) after ~2!!! second delay while on previous Mac it was instant.
That's not an issue I've experienced. Screenshot works instantly for me (both CmdShift-3 and CmdShift-4).
> "Very fast" some say? I still wish to see it, because so far it feels just like the one I had before or slower! I am not talking about benchmarks, I am talking about day to day experience.
What are you running? I'm comparing my M1 air to two a year and old MBP (which admittedly has half the RAM), and it flies in comparison; both in perceived and actual performance. The MBP has consistently latency in the UI animations, which makes using it a pain; and the fan constantly blares at the slightest hint of CPU activity.
> Goodness, can Apple make something that 'works' these days?
For most people, it seems to be working for them. So it looks like they can make something that 'works', but you've apparently run into an extreme edge case alongside some poor luck.
> That's not an issue I've experienced. Screenshot works instantly for me (both CmdShift-3 and CmdShift-4).
I have seen it take a few seconds to appear on the Desktop, but I thought that was the new Mac OS thing: the little thumbnail of your screenshot appearing during that delay in the lower right of the screen, not a hardware-specific thing.
No, In my case I meant, pressing Cmd-Shift-4 takes ±1-2 secs for cross-cursor to appear before you actually take the screenshot. Now I've checked taking with screenshot of Cmd-Shift-3 and it 'Takes' it after some delay. Not instantly like before. It saves it with additional delay like you describe, but it's something else. Still dumb and annoying in my opinion but I believe you can turn it off somewhere in GUI or with the command in terminal.
The next screenshot you take can be faster. But not always. There is some loading happening I believe before the first one. Than it works fast but Then it unloads something sometimes and sometimes not. I do not think it's a hardware problem like some say.
For anybody wondering about the terminal command, you can disable the thumbnail and make it instantaneously save with: defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-thumbnail -bool false
I can't speak to the rest of the slowness. But that thumbnail sure is annoying.
I think the parent is saying you’re having bad hardware luck manifesting as glitches in software. I just tried what you described with Settings+GarageBand and was not able to reproduce on my M1 MBA.
> you’re having bad hardware luck manifesting as glitches in software
This was precisely my experience back in December.
I purchased a stock M1 MacBook Pro as well as a customized M1 MacBook Pro, so I could set up the OS as I wanted and migrate Data and settings once the customized Device arrived.
The first device behaved as expected: fast performance, responsive UI, cool operating temperature.
The second device, however, had issues with UI latency, beachballing Finder operations, and inexplicable slow downs.
I tried installing and reinstalling and remigrating the OS, eventually discovering that one or both of my users would be unable to even login to the system. Further analysis revealed that the communication between the T2 chip and the hard drive (or some aspect of the trust a computer system) was not operating properly.
I'm not technical enough to detail the exact problem, but it was most certainly a hardware issue or a hardware issue related to the incomplete erasing and reformatting of the M1 MacBook Pro's hard drive.
I returned both devices, waited a couple of weeks, and purchased a single customized MacBook Air.
This MacBook Air in my experience actually outperforms both previous M1 MacBook Pros. I don't have benchmarks nor do I have the other devices to compare directly, but it seems that this MacBook Air is much more ready for prime time then my mid-December MacBook Pros.
>Further analysis revealed that the communication between the T2 chip and the hard drive (or some aspect of the trust a computer system) was not operating properly.
From my experience there is no point dealing with issue on brand new Macs. The best is to send it back if you’re within the 14 days return window, or take it to a store to get it fixed. It’s not as smooth as it used to be because there is so much in M1 devices that’s different from previous generations, and support people are not necessarily used to it yet. But customer support is consistently great, all things considered.
The reverse is also true. People think if they experience a bug, then everyone experiences the bug and it's the most important bug ever.
Everyones setup and use case is unique. All the many interactions can lead to fairly unique bugs. Even if two people think they see the same bug, it could be two different bugs causing the same symptom.
Let's take the bugs around re-installing that have been popping up on HN lately. How many people buy a brand new machine and the first thing they do is wipe it and re-install? I don't personally know anyone who does that, it's certainly not something I've ever done with any of my Macs over the last 20 or so odd years. So while I think bugs around re-installing are important and need to get fixed, they are not something that a majority of users will run into this early in the m1's life.
In this case I doubt "two HN users doing daily development and production on a new Mac" are so unique as to be incomparable.
And arguing that certain users are in a minority such that they can be ignored - without hard proof mind you, and keeping in mind that knowledge work is squarely the demographic for people requiring high performance processors in the Apple space (or else they wouldn't push that angle so hard in their advertising) - when the functionality was stable on previous platforms much older than the so-called cutting edge, is justifying a regression in functionality by blaming user expectations. This is consumer hostile.
> In this case I doubt "two HN users doing daily development and production on a new Mac" are so unique as to be incomparable.
I would have argued the opposite. Every developer I know, myself included, tweaks every last aspect of their machine to their exact liking - even on a Mac.
And I didn't say they should be ignored, and said the opposite.
> So while I think bugs around re-installing are important and need to get fixed
The point is it's a bug impacting a subset of users and needs to get fixed. IMO, it's not one worthy of multiple HN front page posts, but here we are :)
Clearly it is important to the people posting the issues, and people upvoting. People, which are some of the main target audience of “pro” dubbed machines. The truth is, however, that there is nothing “pro” about Apple products anymore. Anything outside of the most mundane happy-path is often broken in strange ways. And the typical Apple drone response is: “Who does that anyway? I certainly don’t! So manage your expectations.”
Apple software is buggy and broken beyond belief. Hardware might be good, but that is increasingly beside the point, given how broken Apple software and UX are.
> The truth is, however, that there is nothing “pro” about Apple products anymore.
Anymore? I feel like a lot of people romanticize old Apple. For example, the first few versions of OS X were pretty bad. They did finally settle down, but then entered a yin/yang good/bad release schedule. There was time when installing a beta or even .0 version was almost guaranteed to lose data. Now, I tend to run betas pretty early on. There are some bugs, but they mostly work.
I don't see Apple products as any more or less 'pro' than they have always been. Once the software catches up, my m1 MBA doesn't seem anymore or less capable than my G4 Powerbook. TBH, the M1 MBA is already more capable because at the time software had already moved on to Intel while I still had my G4.
IMO, the biggest missteps that I would consider less pro on the portable side would be the 1 port MB, and the keyboard. Both of which Apple has moved on from, though the keyboard took way too long to address. I know people complain about ports, but I find usbc (unless there's only 1), the most pro thing about apple laptops because they can morph into anything a pro may need.
>The truth is, however, that there is nothing “pro” about Apple products anymore.
The truth this is a tired of chessnut that we've been hearing for 15+ years...
And yet, judging from their laptop choices at conferences, developer videos, and so on, over half of industry leading devs across many communities (from Node to Java, and from Go to Rust and whatever else) use those laptops.
>Apple software is buggy and broken beyond belief.
Not my experience. That said, you're free to use the non-broken Windows and/or Linux OSes!
I have not been saying that in the past. I am saying it now. I also use Windows increasingly more and more, and experience significantly less bugs, even in old Win32 APIs which still “just work”, unlike Apple’s many many frameworks (new and old) which are broken in different ways. Or its system software, which keeps getting rewritten in half-assed ways with missing feature, and then never revisited or fixed.
How many people buy a brand new machine and the first thing they do is wipe it and re-install?
Well, everyone who would sell their machine could go through that process. And if this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204426) is correct then I would not call it an 'edge' case.
Besides It's a safety feature. You need it to work when nothing else works. It should be extremely reliable. And if it's not then the only 'reliable' feature of the Mac you have is DFU mode and booting from another Mac.
I don't personally know anyone who does that.
I personally don't know anyone who dealt with failing computers who doesn't do that. Besides you need partitions for multi boot configuration.
All your examples are not of people buying a brand new m1 and immediately re-installing. They are examples why it needs to get fixed, but right now likely has a low impact on the user base.
> How many people buy a brand new machine and the first thing they do is wipe it and re-install?
I do it on every brand new machine I buy; they come with Windows or Ubuntu, and I use another Linux distribution. And for Windows users, AFAIK for a long time the recommendation has also been to immediately wipe it and reinstall, to remove any shovelware which came with the machine.
>The reverse is also true. People think if they experience a bug, then everyone experiences the bug and it's the most important bug ever.
The reverse is not always true, because some people have certain knowledge and if they experience some bug they could analyse it and make an educated guess about the quality of the product and importance of the bug.
I personally have seen many bugs in Disk Utility. On my previous Mac I couldn't make volume to be named as I wanted in certain conditions no matter how hard I tried with diff scenarios. Disk Utility was simply renaming it to something else. Something unrelated. It was obviously a bug and it was reproducible. And this was not the only one. Another one I've seen that Disk Utility simply cannot format the drive. I've seen more and it's getting worse and worse. After seeng those I was wondering do they test it at all? Does one who tests it knew how to do it?
>People seem to think that if they don’t experience a bug, it’s an “extreme edge case”
And they're usually right. From millions of units sold, a small number usually has a bug, unless it's an OS bug independent of the hardware (and also not dependent on the use of a specific software setup, e.g. some ACE plugin or some app messing with some system).
1000 people having the problem and 100 reporting it and some news sites picking it up can make for a big fuss in blogs and posts, but it's still around 1 / 2000 people having the issue in a 2M production run.
I am mostly speaking about OS bugs, not hardware. The hardware side of Apple is still of high quality. It’s the software that is becoming increasing terrible.
1/2000 is still a big number, considering the Apple numbers. I doubt their hardware has so many issues.
That's not an issue I've experienced. Screenshot works instantly for me (both CmdShift-3 and CmdShift-4).
> "Very fast" some say? I still wish to see it, because so far it feels just like the one I had before or slower! I am not talking about benchmarks, I am talking about day to day experience.
What are you running? I'm comparing my M1 air to two a year and old MBP (which admittedly has half the RAM), and it flies in comparison; both in perceived and actual performance. The MBP has consistently latency in the UI animations, which makes using it a pain; and the fan constantly blares at the slightest hint of CPU activity.
> Goodness, can Apple make something that 'works' these days?
For most people, it seems to be working for them. So it looks like they can make something that 'works', but you've apparently run into an extreme edge case alongside some poor luck.