We shouldn't have to restart Apple devices to fix them.

[mcled53]

That's not quite what I'm saying here. There will never not be bugs.

My point here is that it should be easy to automatically recover from problems should they occur. It shouldn't have a confusing result like a click doing nothing, or iCloud sync suddenly not working, or software updates failing to install with no explanation and the only option being to restart the device entirely if the problem is with a specific daemon or background service. (I shouldn't need to run a Terminal command, either.)

There also needs to be better QA/QC so that edge cases can be detected and resolved as much as possible.

I totally agree. Furthermore there should be a traceback/log of what caused the error so possibly Apple can fix it or the user can slightly change their workflow or configuration to avoid the OS Failure.

 

[Analog Kid]

I fully agree with the premise here, but as a practical matter starting over is just the surest path to getting out of an unknown state.

It would be nice for the system to better detect functional failures, but it's easier said than done. Often the reason the system confidently declares success when it fails is because all the metrics it has access to show no problem but the human didn't get what they expect.

I think some of the reason the support articles fall back to restarts though is because it's easier to explain to Joe User than a complex debugging flow chart. If they can focus on making sure the system boots into a good state then it saves a lot of "look at this file, what do you see" instructions.

Another thing that makes it hard is that I suspect most of us don't opt in to the "share system metrics to help us improve" options. That leaves them pretty blind, to be fair. I'd like to say that everyone complaining about Apple not meeting their needs should turn on the metrics option so Apple knows what their needs are, but I keep it off too so don't have much of a leg to stand on.

None the less, I agree with the intent. It would also be nice if we could do incremental upgrades without requiring reboot, while we're at it.

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

We shouldn't have to restart our Apple devices to make them work.

Yes because it's totally just Apple devices a simple reboot can fix problems with.

Sure, Apple silicon processors are extremely fast these days, making restarts faster than ever. But the fact of the matter remains that we shouldn't need to interrupt our workflows to restart our devices.

Do you even understand why restarts fix problems? Sometimes software ends up in a problematic state, either a scenario the developers and testers missed, or there was a change in the process that is conflicting with something, and so on and so on. Doing a reboot reverts the code back to square one so any issues that were happening are gone.

Here is an example of this that I encounter often: AirDrop on the Mac. Sometimes it will fail to work; clicking on the icon for my iPhone or iPad will do nothing. Sometimes this can be fixed by running "killall sharingd" in Terminal; however, most of the time, I need to restart the Mac for it to work again. This is on an M1 MacBook Air, by the way. (Now, I'm not saying that we need to tell users to run a Terminal command; this is just an illustrative example.)

From what I've seen -- and this is my opinion -- most of the strange issues that people have are the result of the system entering a "quasi-working" indeterminate state that Apple did not expect to occur and as such does not provide a way for the system to recover from.

Here's an idea: Open the Feedback Assistant, and submit a bug report:

Bug Reporting - Apple Developer

Now with Feedback Assistant available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web, it’s easier to submit effective bug reports and request enhancements to APIs and tools.

developer.apple.com

That way Apple's software engineers know there's a problem and can patch it. You have a rough idea of what's causing the AirDrop issue, so file a ticket of it in the Feedback Assistant and how to replicate it, combined with logs of your Mac, so Apple's software engineers can take a look.

If Apple is focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements for their next-generation operating systems as the rumors say, then they need to focus on identifying edge-case/indeterminate situations and providing a way for the system to recover from them, automatically. And they need to make sure that the system can only operate in determinate, well-defined conditions.

Like I said: There are some issues that programmers and testers miss. That's why we have the Feedback Assistant so if something is caught you can report it to get it fixed.

My 14 inch Macbook Pro had audio issues for months so I reported it to Apple and in turn got it fixed. Apple isn't gonna fix the problem if they don't know about it.

How can this be applied to the example above? On Apple platforms, launchd is responsible for launching daemons and background tasks, and restarting these processes if they crash. However, to my knowledge, there is not a way for launchd to detect an unresponsive process and automatically restart it. In the AirDrop example above, it's my belief that the root cause is sharingd becoming unresponsive or otherwise unable to receive user input. A useful fix would be for launchd to send a "heartbeat" signal to the processes and restart them transparently if they don't respond within a certain time frame. (This approach wouldn't work for user-facing applications, but it would certainly work for background services and daemons that don't put windows on screen.)

I believe a similar approach is used in embedded systems where humans might not be physically near the system to restart it at will. If Apple truly wants to make their computers like appliances, then they should build the software with that philosophy in mind; human intervention shouldn't be required to get out of indeterminate states.

Again: Feedback Assistant. Tell Apple this, not us.

Of course, this would lead to a far better user experience, which is the point of me writing all this. Things will "just work."

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

My thought is you should've spent your time writing this thread instead on writing a ticket in the Feedback Assistant

Which you should do, right now. https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/

You can also provide feature and change suggestions in the Feedback Assistant, not just bug reports.

 

[prime17569]

Yes because it's totally just Apple devices a simple reboot can fix problems with.



Do you even understand why restarts fix problems? Sometimes software ends up in a problematic state, either a scenario the developers and testers missed, or there was a change in the process that is conflicting with something, and so on and so on. Doing a reboot reverts the code back to square one so any issues that were happening are gone.



Here's an idea: Open the Feedback Assistant, and submit a bug report:

Bug Reporting - Apple Developer

Now with Feedback Assistant available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web, it’s easier to submit effective bug reports and request enhancements to APIs and tools.

developer.apple.com

That way Apple's software engineers know there's a problem and can patch it. You have a rough idea of what's causing the AirDrop issue, so file a ticket of it in the Feedback Assistant and how to replicate it, combined with logs of your Mac, so Apple's software engineers can take a look.



Like I said: There are some issues that programmers and testers miss. That's why we have the Feedback Assistant so if something is caught you can report it to get it fixed.

My 14 inch Macbook Pro had audio issues for months so I reported it to Apple and in turn got it fixed. Apple isn't gonna fix the problem if they don't know about it.



Again: Feedback Assistant. Tell Apple this, not us.



My thought is you should've spent your time writing this thread instead writing a ticket in the Feedback Assistant

Which you should do, right now. https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/

You can also provide feature and change suggestions in the Feedback Assistant, not just bug reports.

I do want to submit a feedback report, but the issues I'm experiencing happen at random, and I haven't yet found a clear way to reproduce them. The "killall sharingd" trick only works about 50% of the time, which is as good as random chance. All of Apple's feedback reports require reproduction steps. If I knew how to reproduce the issues reliably I would file a feedback report ASAP. I provide more context in some of my follow-up posts in the thread which (I hope) are far more level-headed.

I'll also add that I have had good experiences with getting my issues fixed by Apple when reporting them.

I also wrote my initial post in a moment of frustration, so I didn't quite think everything through. I have edited my original post to reflect this.

 

[Analog Kid]

check for any "this isn't working right" or "something is kinda fishy" condition

I gotta say, it would be awesome if I could run 'top' and see "fishy" as the run state along with running, sleeping, etc...

 

[dmr727]

Dating myself here, but I've been rebooting devices to fix problems for quite literally four decades, and the software was orders of magnitude less complex back then.

In other words, I'd love peace in the Middle East too.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I do wish I didn't have to restart my electronics as much as I do. Seems like it's getting worse with time too. Looking at you my Samsung TV and sound bar! Actually who am I kidding, I remember having to restart Windows all the time growing up. lol.

 

[Big Bad D]

What’s the hardship of having to do a restart occasionally for an update?

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

I do want to submit a feedback report, but the issues I'm experiencing happen at random, and I haven't yet found a clear way to reproduce them. The "killall sharingd" trick only works about 50% of the time, which is as good as random chance. All of Apple's feedback reports require reproduction steps. If I knew how to reproduce the issues reliably I would file a feedback report ASAP. I provide more context in some of my follow-up posts in the thread which (I hope) are far more level-headed.

I'll also add that I have had good experiences with getting my issues fixed by Apple when reporting them.

I also wrote my initial post in a moment of frustration, so I didn't quite think everything through. I have edited my original post to reflect this.

Even if you don't know how to reproduce it, still report it. Otherwise they're gonna assume everything is fine and your occasional issue won't get resolved

 

[motorazr]

I have had these issues on multiple Mac laptops with no third party hardware installed. With regards to third party software, nothing out of the ordinary- just Microsoft Office, Slack, Spotify, VS Code, Xcode, Chrome, Firefox, Zoom, VLC and a few other things. All from the Mac App Store where possible (except for Xcode, which doesn't download properly from the MAS and hasn't done so for years).

What frustrates me - and what motivated this post - is that these issues occur at random when I least expect them. I can't reliably reproduce them at all. They're little things, but it's really disruptive when you're expecting things to work and they don't. This is especially true of Continuity features, most notably the Universal Clipboard and Universal Control. I might not know why the problem is occurring, but the system certainly does because these are first-party features. Why can't the system diagnose and attempt to fix the problem automatically?

I opened this thread to see someone complain bugs happen.

I was surprised and delighted to read a valid argument, and something I’ve been saying for years. These sort of issues became more common around 10.7 and newer.

macOS (and iOS) have no means of self-solving basic issues, like when a system task is stuck, nor do they offer any communication to users that it’s stuck. Better still, some of these automated services have no means of resetting by a reboot, but actually require knowledge of terminal and what process supports what command to get going.

iCloud Drive sync is my pet peeve here. Manually resetting bird to get it moving, or deleting cache files because it uploads one file and then stops again until you do ….. there really ought to be listening agent for the service to confirm it’s making some sort of progress, not just repeating an error infinitely.

And yes, these random issues occur with or without user software. Each update tends to modify the unexpected behavior without resolving; it seems no one at apple is interested in ending fringe cases.


Alas, I feel normal users are becoming the fringe cases; not just “power users” or developers. Just day-to-day using the device to browse the web and email, sync iCloud, etc.

Thanks for sharing the experience; if nothing else there’s comfort in numbers

 

[motorazr]

Honestly I think this comes from not understanding the complexities of a full on operating system.

And other guy is right about demanding software without bugs.

While it’s generally true that, with enough knowledge, you can often never have to restart a traditional computer to fix bugs, you can’t do the same on a security restricted device and maintain the security.

I can’t kill background services and restart them, i can’t look at system logs (directly) and reload a kernel module.

And for the general public, even if they could, it would simply take less time to reboot the device.

On this same note, we really shouldn’t have to just erase our device and not restore from backup to fix an iCloud bug. That I can get behind.

I see your point here; a bigger issue that is related, are the number of system services that may become stuck almost immediately after a reboot or work for an hour or two but have no means of alerting a user, resolving the issue with a system service on boot (tho safe mode does to some of this on reboot) , etc.

Meaning more restarts to get the device acting normally on a regular basis.

A proposed fix would be some sort of listener for stuck system services or syncing services with basic abilities to self solve some faults; or at a minimum report them to the user in a useful way.

 

[UMHurricanes34]

That's not quite what I'm saying here. There will never not be bugs.

My point here is that it should be easy to automatically recover from problems should they occur. It shouldn't have a confusing result like a click doing nothing, or iCloud sync suddenly not working, or software updates failing to install with no explanation and the only option being to restart the device entirely if the problem is with a specific daemon or background service. (I shouldn't need to run a Terminal command, either.)

There also needs to be better QA/QC so that edge cases can be detected and resolved as much as possible.

When it comes to software feedback (something Steve used to brag about), Apple has 100% regressed back to sperm and egg. Completely unusable in areas and items that used to have feedback no longer provide feedback. It’s bad.

 

[klasma]

Please point me to the marketing materials using that phrase.

 

[Kieranrosevear]

It is something Apple themselves struggle with, you remember the saga with the copy and paste persistent prompts? Something they knew others were experiencing but couldn’t replicate in-house.

Many “interesting” bugs are intermittent, highly dependent on use patterns, and very difficult to reproduce.

Third parties are changing software at the same time, often introducing issues that customers incorrectly attribute to OS updates.

Customers change their own behavior without realizing it, and often attribute changes (e.g. to battery life) to the software rather than to the change in how much they are using their device, and what they are doing with it (e.g. spending time on vacation under poor cellular signal strength, taking lots of video, playing lots of games, …).

 

[mittencuh]

If I don't restart my PC every 7 days, by day 14 my IT department forces a restart. I'm ok restarting an Apple device on occasion.

 

[Zdigital2015]

In many Apple support threads online where people encounter strange issues with their devices, a restart often fixes the issue. Great, right? I think not.

We shouldn't have to restart our Apple devices to make them work.

Sure, Apple silicon processors are extremely fast these days, making restarts faster than ever. But the fact of the matter remains that we shouldn't need to interrupt our workflows to restart our devices.

Here is an example of this that I encounter often: AirDrop on the Mac. Sometimes it will fail to work; clicking on the icon for my iPhone or iPad will do nothing. Sometimes this can be fixed by running "killall sharingd" in Terminal; however, most of the time, I need to restart the Mac for it to work again. This is on an M1 MacBook Air, by the way. (Now, I'm not saying that we need to tell users to run a Terminal command; this is just an illustrative example.)

From what I've seen -- and this is my opinion -- most of the strange issues that people have are the result of the system entering a "quasi-working" indeterminate state that Apple did not expect to occur and as such does not provide a way for the system to recover from.

If Apple is focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements for their next-generation operating systems as the rumors say, then they need to focus on identifying edge-case/indeterminate situations and providing a way for the system to recover from them, automatically. And they need to make sure that the system can only operate in determinate, well-defined conditions.

How can this be applied to the example above? On Apple platforms, launchd is responsible for launching daemons and background tasks, and restarting these processes if they crash. However, to my knowledge, there is not a way for launchd to detect an unresponsive process and automatically restart it. In the AirDrop example above, it's my belief that the root cause is sharingd becoming unresponsive or otherwise unable to receive user input. A useful fix would be for launchd to send a "heartbeat" signal to the processes and restart them transparently if they don't respond within a certain time frame. (This approach wouldn't work for user-facing applications, but it would certainly work for background services and daemons that don't put windows on screen.)

I believe a similar approach is used in embedded systems where humans might not be physically near the system to restart it at will. If Apple truly wants to make their computers like appliances, then they should build the software with that philosophy in mind; human intervention shouldn't be required to get out of indeterminate states.

Of course, this would lead to a far better user experience, which is the point of me writing all this. Things will "just work."

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

EDIT: original post was written in a moment of frustration. Please read the thread before replying.

Wait until you get a car with as many electonics and the only way to get things working is to “reboot” it.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Don’t we all wish, these pesky annoyances of restarts are banished for ever. It’s hard to pin point issues when it could be OS, App or state of a transaction could be causing these issues. Having lived through some atrocious work provided laptops with BSOD a decade or prior, I am just happy to use what Apple provides.
I do turn on Apple feedback mechanism, if I encounter annoying bugs which need restart. Some of them were fixed by Apple in their own sweet time, others were more fault of App developers.
You will have better luck giving feedback to Apple than venting on MacRumors.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Wait until you get a car with as many electonics and the only way to get things working is to “reboot” it.

I have seen cars rebooting after auto stops at traffic light and have trouble starting back.

 

[eicca]

Soooooo what’s actually the problem? I never have to restart my Apple devices due to issues. Old Mac Pro, M1 MacBook Air, iPads, iPhones, they always end up getting restarted due to software updates and nothing more.

I can think of maybe one time I rebooted my iPhone to clear a bug with sending text messages a few years ago.

 

[PlainBelliedSneetch]

That's not quite what I'm saying here. There will never not be bugs.

My point here is that it should be easy to automatically recover from problems should they occur.

The next time I write a bug, I will make sure I include the jump to the automatic recovery routine. Hopefully that doesn’t have any bugs.

 

[fatTribble]

I feel your pain and think it’s an admirable goal. Personally my MacBook has been rock solid. I rarely ever reboot it. I feel like I go months between reboots. As a previous post said, it’s probably the simplest solution for the average person. I’m sure someday reboots will be gone or just even more rare.

My rather poor analogy is that a mall could ask everyone to wipe their feet before they come in and be very careful not to spill a drink on the floor so that the floor always stays clean. Or they could just mop it every night. I feel like as long as you run any non-Apple software bad things will eventually happen.

Again, it’s an admirable goal. But it’s probably not my top priority for Apple at the moment.

 

[HDFan]

It's not just rebooting that can "refresh" things. Talked with a Senior Apple Support rep who reinstalls his OS every month to avoid problems. Luckily you can do that without wiping your programs and data.

 

[alanvitek]

I’ve also had problems with airdrop more recently (I feel like I’m the early 2010s it worked better than it does now).

Can I ask if you’re using a mesh Wi-Fi system? I have no data to back this up but I feel like I’ve had issues where my phone may be in the 2.4ghz band and my laptop may be on the 5ghz band and even though they are labeled as a single network, this could be causing the airdrop to fail.

but I could be totally barking up the wrong tree here - I’m certainly not an expert. I’ve noticed that sometimes turning Wi-Fi off/on on either device can help airdrop work again and was wondering if doing so it just happened to switch to the correct/matching band in the process

 

[TechnoMonk]

I’ve also had problems with airdrop more recently (I feel like I’m the early 2010s it worked better than it does now).

Can I ask if you’re using a mesh Wi-Fi system? I have no data to back this up but I feel like I’ve had issues where my phone may be in the 2.4ghz band and my laptop may be on the 5ghz band and even though they are labeled as a single network, this could be causing the airdrop to fail.

but I could be totally barking up the wrong tree here - I’m certainly not an expert. I’ve noticed that sometimes turning Wi-Fi off/on on either device can help airdrop work again and was wondering if doing so it just happened to switch to the correct/matching band in the process

I had airplay issues with dual band mesh networks. I disabled 2.4 GHz, and just use 5 GHz Wi-Fi. There aren’t many devices left in my household that are 2.4 GHz only. Don’t have any air drop issues though.

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

The way that all hardware and software run right now, that’s just going to be necessary. I know it can be frustrating and ill timed sometimes. When you have tons of apps going and are in the middle of projects, tons of tabs, etc.

But it’s just life as we know it right now. And I don’t think that it will change anytime soon.

I have to restart for airdrop and continuity camera if it’s been a few days since I last used it.

So I get it.