OSX 10.12 first impressions

[serr]

Just a shocking level of bug riddled disaster here. Not sure how else to put it. For Apple to release an OS this unfinished is stunning.

Right off the top.:
The preference to unhide the Gatekeeper option to allow 3rd party apps is missing. You need to run the command line: sudo spctl --master-disable
They screwed this up the same way they screwed up the missing preference for unhiding the ~/Library folder in 10.7.

Click-dragging is disabled by default!
You read that right. Can't imaging who requested that...
And the control is in System Preferences/Accessibility - NOT Trackpad!

There's a new feature (or it appeared to be anyway). What happens is the first time you click the shift or command modifier keys to do something (eg. make a selection range, spot selections with ⌘-click, opening a link in a new tab with ⌘-click, etc), the modifier key is ignored. A 2nd click works as expected. (The 2nd click has to be within a few moments of the first or it 'resets'.) It's like trying to use a broken mouse or a trackpad on a Windows machine!

For example, it's impossible to make a range selection (in the Finder in list view) followed by ⌘-click spot selections (all in the same selection - starting with the shift-click range and then adding additional selections with ⌘-click) with this enabled.

I just had a chat with Apple Support on where and how to turn it off and they said there was no control and it's a bug they're working on.

Then there's this nsurlsessiond service that tries to call home nearly constantly. Haven't dug into that and what to turn off yet. Just denied it for now. Not too impressed.


I'll post a complete setup checklist here after a spell (with more positive language and solutions). (And keep working in 10.6 and/or 10.10 in the meantime!)

I recommend avoiding this OS install for now unless you really truly have to have Siri (the only new feature I noticed).
My laptop 'requested' a new SSD from me yesterday so I thought I might as well test the new OSX install. This 10.12 was a clean install. I updated to 10.12.4 right away too but it didn't address any of the above. (Finally used up that 1st gen Wintec Express card SSD! Installed a Samsung 840 Pro and said goodby to the optical drive I hardly use to put the 1TB HDD there. Going with both 10.6.8 & 10.12 on the SSD at present. Subject to them actually finishing 10.12!)

more:
So the system is chewing up almost 3GB of ram just browsing the internet! Nothing is crashed... This OS is wholly broken! The OS seems to use 2GB just idling. Sure we have machines with stupid amounts of ram now but this is pretty wrong. I think we're done here for now.

Yeah, so everything about this felt like regression.

What are the Linux people up to these days?

[ivansc]

One reason my Mac Mini is still on an earlier version and happily running reaper and logic pro 9.

[serr]

I'm still beyond happy with both Carbon Copy Cloner (for easily shuffling OS installs around) and Little Snitch (for alerting me to shenanigans and letting me lock the door).

I can't recommend these apps enough (no matter what OS you run)!

A big ol' hard drive crash was once again just a minor inconvenience.

Follow up on the mystery feature/bug:
I notice that if you click the track pad with force (not absurdly, just slightly stronger than your lightest touch) the problem goes away.

So there's some tap force range feature gone awry or something. I normally use a light touch on a trackpad as well as use tap to click. I verified this beyond any doubt that it's not hardware failure. Trackpad is as responsive as ever in both 10.6 & 10.10. 10.12 needs to see a tap force above X or it ignores trackpad input. So they must have some new feature where they're parsing the force you tap with and it's not working correctly.

So there's your workaround. WORK that poor trackpad!

[rangerx]

apple busy selling watches

and why in the world did they follow windows graphics , they call it the clean look, zero imagination there, i sell my art, for sure if i painted three colors on canvas it would be a hard sell

maybe they should loose stocks to realize they started with quality

i'm sticking with yosemite

[greenbuoy]

I updated my operating system to Sierra about a month ago. I was working on some songs this week after I updated to Reaper 5.40. My IMac (mid 2011) screen would randomly go blank and the computer would restart in the middle of editing. I reverted back to an early version of 5 and things seem to be working ok.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue?

[serr]

Originally Posted by greenbuoy

I updated my operating system to Sierra about a month ago. I was working on some songs this week after I updated to Reaper 5.40. My IMac (mid 2011) screen would randomly go blank and the computer would restart in the middle of editing. I reverted back to an early version of 5 and things seem to be working ok.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue?

Well, you proved that the variable in question here for your issue was a version of Reaper, not OSX.

From that I would suspect that a new feature or bit of code in the newer version of Reaper stressed your machine more than the old one and fleshed out a GPU or overheating fault.

That would be my first suspicion and I would run hardware tests.

It's possible that there's a scenario like a new feature in the newer build of Reaper that uses a new feature of OSX 10.12 and said new feature of 10.12 has a bug.

We've seen now how 10.12 likes to shut a machine down at startup instead of giving a kernel panic or circle/slash (when something is wrong that would cause that). Easy to start suspecting that scenario for other things following that. I think this one is more of a stretch though and I'd start testing hardware. Tough call...

Find a way to eliminate Reaper from your variables when shaking that out. Run your CPU cores up to 100% ("yes > /dev/null" command for each core with Terminal) and see what happens for example.

[serr]

Still trying to get to the bottom of nsurlsessiond & akd trying to call home literally every 5 seconds! (Denying them currently. But they're still running and using about 1GB of ram.)

These are apparently utility services for file syncing and file sharing operations for iCloud and the App store. Disabled all that per SOP. There's something else using them though and I haven't found it yet.

Probably more new features they forgot to include controls for in a menu. That seems to be the current style of faux pas.

Googling is only getting me mention of iCloud and the App store. Then it goes to parsing the communications... (hours of tech sleuth work I'm not exactly hungry for... especially if someone might just know the answer already).

Has anyone gotten to the bottom of this mess with this OS install and cleaned all this up yet? (And is this OS version even worth it?)


Don't install 10.12 on a production machine yet folks!

[Vasily]

I have no problems with cmd-click, tried to reproduce and failed (possibly the case is I have a newer Mac with a different touchpad).

Reaper, Studio One, Melodyne, EZDrummer, Kontakt and a couple of free plugins seem to work without problems yet.

Memory usage for me is on par with 10.11 (which is notably larger than 10.8 BTW, but my hardware does not support an OS that old).

Just a piece of advice: if your MacBook really has 6GB of RAM, that's rather little for 10.9 and above. I believe, it should be upgradable in your model. 8GB is minimum these days, 16GB is luxury.

[Vasily]

Originally Posted by serr

Has anyone gotten to the bottom of this mess with this OS install and cleaned all this up yet? (And is this OS version even worth it?)

I did no cleaning or tweaking after the 10.12 upgrade and it runs fine for me on two machines. I really like the Night Shift and CLI utilities updates.

I'm not really sure if 10.11 was more stable than 10.12. On-par. 10.10 was more buggy AFAIR.

[cyrano]

Originally Posted by serr

There's something else using them though and I haven't found it yet.

Probably Messaging...

It's a bit too much:

- Bonjour
- Push mail
- iMessages
- Sync
- Time Machine
- Spotlight
- IAC
...

all use Messaging. And that used to work fine when Bonjour was restricted to the local network. And when Growl was Growl and not a part of Messaging. Now it needs to talk to the cloud. Which might fail if you don't have an iCloud account (probably never tested as it is incomprehensible to Apple that you wouldn't have an iCloud account) or if you have several accounts.

[serr]

The track pad issue is not related to specific modifier combinations. That was coincidental stuff leading to that initial conclusion.

There's some new feature that allows the system to read you touching the trackpad with different levels of force. (Like a musical keyboard might have.) It's a small faux pas with that. Sometimes tapping the trackpad with a lighter touch is being ignored. This is repeatable and 10.12 is where this kicked in. Older OSX installs do not have this feature.

You didn't have a comment on my question about nsurlsessiond & akd.
Anyone else in the know?

Haha, did someone make a rule about ram counts for 2017 or something? Your system uses as much ram as the apps you run use. Very few (Reaper DAW included) will use above 2GB. The exception might be a sampler plugin that loads samples into ram. By all means knock yourself out and install 128GB ram if you want to see that number there in system information!
Take a look at Activity Monitor and you'll probably see as much as 4GB used in a heavier audio project.

Anyway, the point wasn't these services even remotely stressing the system. I just noted that a tiny bit of ram use as another telltale. More about trying to be thorough in system setup. Services throwing interrupts at the CPU can still get in the way with real time audio work going on.

[serr]

Originally Posted by cyrano

Probably Messaging...

It's a bit too much:

- Bonjour
- Push mail
- iMessages
- Sync
- Time Machine
- Spotlight
- IAC
...

all use Messaging. And that used to work fine when Bonjour was restricted to the local network. And when Growl was Growl and not a part of Messaging. Now it needs to talk to the cloud. Which might fail if you don't have an iCloud account (probably never tested as it is incomprehensible to Apple that you wouldn't have an iCloud account) or if you have several accounts.

I thought I made it through everything...
Could the service be still trying to connect even when everything using it is turned off? A default state or like they couldn't imagine all the services using it would ever be turned off so the connection service still tries to connect even though there's no data to exchange?

I haven't tested 10.12 with any audio work yet. Just wanted to get familiar with it because it's there. SOP for an install has always been to go through the system and learn where everything is just to have the ability to turn things off if needed.

This still feels more beta than I've experienced before with a new install of OSX.
I was kind of hoping the heavyweight OSX gurus would have easy to google answers already!

[cyrano]

There are some serious changes to the underpinnings of OSX in Sierra. Some of it has to do with the new filesystem - a good thing, in my view. Some of it has to do with Apple's drive to keep a ghost file. Not the content, but the metadata of your files. And they want to keep that in the cloud. A big advantage if they need to identify you. And that has to do with the coming payment processor. The second ARM chip in a Mac. Another good thing, for security and convenience. The first one is the function key replacement in the newest Macbooks.

The fingerprint ID thing has one big disadvantage. Any kid can fake it, with a bit of wood glue and your fingerprint on a drinking glass, fi.

Apple is trying hard to link that to other identifiers, like DNA, behavioural data...

I had to disable a large part of messaging in Mavericks. I only did because I'm stubborn. The symptom was indexing (spotlight) at night, coupled with heavy network traffic. It looked as if Spotlight and Quickview couldn't cope with some board view CAD files I use. And that made my old Mac hit the fans. Only between midnight and 6 o'clock, roughly. Local time, of course.

Since I've disabled those services, no more blazing fans at night. Some parts have been re-enabled, mostly because I activated an iphone. So I got the U2 offer in iTunes

Some of these functions shouldn't be enabled at all on a Mac Pro. Who cares about power consumption with a Mac Pro? But they seem to affect AV users. At least some of them. Before, Core Audio was always active. Now, it sleeps too. Maybe useful on a MB Air, or Pro, but not on an AV Mac Pro.

My first goto is antipop:

http://www.tomsick.net/projects/antipop.html

Keeps Core audio alive by "speaking" a space every ten seconds or so.

But I've had reports this no longer works on Sierra.

[serr]

Had a friend complaining about kernel panics and the recovery partition coming up with the circle/slash like you get from trying to boot from an unsupported OSX install with a too old machine.

Obvious hard drive failure I says. Bring it by.

While the root cause of this issue is very likely still a hard drive failure, it seems Apple missed something with this build.

The recovery partition doesn't boot in 10.12!
I did 3 clean installs to verify this wasn't a red herring. Two different machines as well including my laptop. Circle/slash.

Wow...

I've used CCC for backup needs for so long that I never even tested booting from the recovery partition initially.

This is really starting to feel like the end of Apple and OSX.

[cyrano]

Originally Posted by serr

This is really starting to feel like the end of Apple and OSX.

Only it isn't

Apple has a quarter of a billion $ cash, profit is up, business is up...

And it is coming from the Mac, as the iOS stuff is declining a bit.

I wonder why no one else has reported this, AFAIK.

[AugerJ]

If you don't need Logic, why do you need Apple anyway?
If you DO need Logic, it's still compatible with El Capitan... So — why Sierra?
Why, really?

[serr]

Maybe it's still the best thing out there? This feels really sloppy to me with the past performance I was used to.

I consider myself an intermediate user with a strong level of 'knows enough to be dangerous' knowledge. Do you need to be a programmer to use OSX now?

[Vasily]

Originally Posted by serr

The recovery partition doesn't boot in 10.12!
I did 3 clean installs to verify this wasn't a red herring. Two different machines as well including my laptop. Circle/slash.

Just verified: it boots for me. You must be extremely unlucky.

[cyrano]

It must be the season...

I have a MB Pro here that had a dead harddisk. The user replaced the disk and now it doesn't boot. Not from harddisk, not from an external disk. And not in target mode.

I doesn't do a pram reset either, but the SMC reset works.

So you'd think this is a hardware problem, wouldn't you? But all the power lines are present and everything seems to work.

It just doesn't want to boot.

[rangerx]

Originally Posted by cyrano

It must be the season...

I have a MB Pro here that had a dead harddisk. The user replaced the disk and now it doesn't boot. Not from harddisk, not from an external disk. And not in target mode.

I doesn't do a pram reset either, but the SMC reset works.

So you'd think this is a hardware problem, wouldn't you? But all the power lines are present and everything seems to work.

It just doesn't want to boot.

try this when you start the computer hold option key you'll get to a sceen that shows disks to boot from

[cyrano]

Originally Posted by rangerx

try this when you start the computer hold option key you'll get to a sceen that shows disks to boot from

Thanks for the suggestion, but I've naturally tried that. And some other boot options, like command-R and so on. It just doesn't boot. The SMC seems stuck. Wonder what the user did BEFORE he replaced the disk.

[serr]

I did a little searching on this and I see a great many forum posts reading 10.12 the riot act over missing/breaking things on a number of slightly older machines. I downloaded the patch tool from Dosdude (http://dosdude1.com/sierrapatch.html). Ran it, checked the box for 'patch recovery volume' and now the recovery volume boots.

Cool that someone had a fix already! Pretty unimpressed with this level of sloppiness from Apple.

I don't really even use the recovery partition so it's kind of a moot point. I just accidentally stumbled across this. I use CCC and manage my own backup volumes.

Let's see...
- Recovery partition broken out of the box.
- Half implemented light tap drag lock feature that instead ends up making it seem like your track pad is intermittently less responsive.
- A couple services that call home every 5 seconds and Apple service claims to not know what they are (eye rolling emoji here).
- They changed the gatekeeper 'allow everywhere' option to hidden by default but forgot the preference option to unhide it (requires a terminal command).

This is the kind of sloppiness that I used to make jokes about Windows for.

I did try all this with both the clean install and the update to 10.12.4. The .4 update didn't fix anything.

Just shaking my head...

I wouldn't dare use this for any professional work. Never in a million years to run a live sound system!

Oh, and the new style kernel panic that shuts the machine off for you now is freaking customers out! (Had a client with a failing hard drive which can lead to kernel panics from corrupt OS files.)