Mac OS historical fuckups, anyone?



  • Around my home, I use OS X extensively, as it is, in my opinion, the most sane combination of decent UI/UX and Unix there is. Linux is second best, but it's always that I need to tweak a new install for a week until I like it completely and stop noticing it's there. OS X ships with defaults so sane that I don't even need to tweak them much, and just get to business. For what I do (databases and server programming) it's as good as it gets.

    However, not without quirks, but those are on system level.

    My MacBook Pro has 16 gigs of RAM and two identical SSDs installed, and there's striped RAID0 over them (I do keep my backups for all stuff I care about). This way I maximize my I/O bandwidth, and the only way for software to be dog-slow on it is when that software needs to rape the CPU and do complex CPU-bound stuff, or when it's a genuine bag of WTFs (which happens far more often than I'd like). The bad thing about it was that I can create such a setup by only going command line — the latest graphical Disk Utility lost the ability to manage RAID slices with 10.11 release. Also, AppleRAID setup prevents me from having a recovery partition, and everything that comes with that. It's because they have only one scenario on how to create that partition, and it doesn't work on RAID slices (you can't resize them, apparently).

    The solution to the problem of people with multiple disk devices is Fusion Drive, which is poor man's LVM and which Apple as of recent times creates automatically even you only have one disk. The bad thing is that you, again, have to use command-line utilities to manage this setup, you cannot have it striped, you can't snapshot it, you cannot have anything other than HFS+ on it. Which, again, looks like a half-assed solution, given a company that claims so much attention to every minuscule detail.

    Given this interesting situation (some CLI tools in OS X are superior to GUI), my bets are that people who do the BSD core of the OS warned Jony Ive and his likes that they shoot on sight, should he come in their offices' vicinity.

    What interests me, though, is this: did Apple do stuff like that all the time? When you thought they covered every detail of what they themselves claim to support, then you dig in, and then you see clearly that they are not. Were there notable fuckups of older hardware/classic software which stuck like warts on their image? Are there things that you have experienced yourself while using it (I mean, reliably demonstrable fuckups, not the "My Wifi is disconnecting" everyone whines about but no one can reproduce).



  • @wft said:

    but it's always that I need to tweak a new install for a week until I like it completely and stop noticing it's there.

    On this, before anyone asks "why not just carry your .config around?"

    The answer is that every machine I own is different, has a different purpose, and I want the UI to be optimized for each one of them: have a slew of windows on a big screen, and have a single-almost-full-screen focused experience on a small screen, for one.



  • @wft said:

    My Wifi is disconnecting

    More likely to be an AP issue than a NIC one (at least in my personal experience).

    Slightly OT, I know.



  • @wft said:

    Were there notable fuckups of older hardware/classic software which stuck like warts on their image?

    System 7.

    Perhaps the only specific computer product MST3K mocked specifically by name.



  • As a whole, or did it have some specific PITAs?

    (Wasn't it around the time they tried to port it to 386, jointly with IBM, and failed spectacularly?)



  • @wft said:

    As a whole, or did it have some specific PITAs?

    As a whole, it had tons of incompatibility issues with older software (this was back when Apple didn't do that every fucking year.) Carrier Command no longer worked. :( Carrier Command, guyz.

    (Given, it was a copy protection fail, and copy protection is notorious for breaking on OS upgrades, especially back then. But still.)

    (Note the Boss button. Yes that really existed in games back then, it's not just a joke. IIRC in Carrier Command it opened up a screen that looked like a blank Excel sheet.)

    It was also hugely buggy by Apple standards. Here's the bug that vexed me for months: one of the new features of System 7 is you no longer had to use that shitty-ass Font/DA program to install new fonts-- there was just a folder in System Folder named Fonts, and you could just drag the font file into it. Awesome. It worked great. Fonts updated in real-time and everything.

    But now you want to remove the font. You open the Fonts folder, drag the font to the trash. Congratulations; you've permanently corrupted your OS install. Time to get out your system disk and reinstall. And it wasn't a fluke thing; this happened to me 3 times before I figured out what the hell was causing the OS corruption.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @wft said:

    What interests me, though, is this: did Apple do stuff like that all the time? When you thought they covered every detail of what they themselves claim to support, then you dig in, and then you see clearly that they are not. Were there notable fuckups of older hardware/classic software which stuck like warts on their image? Are there things that you have experienced yourself while using it (I mean, reliably demonstrable fuckups, not the "My Wifi is disconnecting" everyone whines about but no one can reproduce).

    @blakeyrat said:

    Mac Classic did everything perfectly, in every way, and HyperCard was the greatest programming environment of all time.

    Post can't be empty.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said:

    Note the Boss button. Yes that really existed in games back then, it's not just a joke. IIRC in Carrier Command it opened up a screen that looked like a blank Excel sheet.

    My Boss Button is bound to Alt-Tab, and that auto-magically hides whatever full-screen erm Application I may have been using, and brings up the last focused one instead.



  • Yes but that didn't exist in 1989.


  • BINNED

    And what when you're watching p0rn on half size?


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    @Luhmann said:

    watching p0rn on half size?

    That sounds like a personal problem to :giggity: Engine.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Yes but that didn't exist in 1989.
    No, but the intonation that it would be a surprise for people of today made me think of how better to analogize it. I see I've failed.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @wft said:
    As a whole, or did it have some specific PITAs?

    As a whole, it had tons of incompatibility issues with older software (this was back when Apple didn't do that every fucking year.) Carrier Command no longer worked. :( Carrier Command, guyz.

    (Given, it was a copy protection fail, and copy protection is notorious for breaking on OS upgrades, especially back then. But still.)

    (Note the Boss button. Yes that really existed in games back then, it's not just a joke. IIRC in Carrier Command it opened up a screen that looked like a blank Excel sheet.)

    It was also hugely buggy by Apple standards. Here's the bug that vexed me for months: one of the new features of System 7 is you no longer had to use that shitty-ass Font/DA program to install new fonts-- there was just a folder in System Folder named Fonts, and you could just drag the font file into it. Awesome. It worked great. Fonts updated in real-time and everything.

    But now you want to remove the font. You open the Fonts folder, drag the font to the trash. Congratulations; you've permanently corrupted your OS install. Time to get out your system disk and reinstall. And it wasn't a fluke thing; this happened to me 3 times before I figured out what the hell was causing the OS corruption.

    The hours I spent looking for the many fun ways in which extensions completely bonked the system.
    Unfortunately, they were needed for things like (I kid you not) TCP/IP, Printing (for some Printers), and reading FAT disks, and some were required by programs.



  • Why wouldn't TCP/IP be an extension? Apple used the true and holy 👼📯 AppleTalk 📯 👼 . Not those lousy Unix protocols.

    (Windows back at that time had IPX instead of TCP/IP. TCP/IP was a separate install there, too.)



  • Good luck having a WAN with AppleTalk or IPX.



  • @wft said:

    Good luck having a WAN with AppleTalk or IPX.

    That's because all the good platforms have to cater to UNIX's shitty inferiority 🚈



  • @wft said:

    What interests me, though, is this: did Apple do stuff like that all the time? When you thought they covered every detail of what they themselves claim to support, then you dig in, and then you see clearly that they are not.

    Another recent example of this attitude would be TRIM support, but I don't think Apple cares about details at that low level. While I also see like OSX for the same reasons, Apple sees it as a GUI driven system, where the user should never have to think about disk formatting and other low level stuff. If that costs performance, so be it.


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