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

[splitpea]

I will say, I’ve been using OS X / MacOS since Jaguar, and it’s only in the last 5 years that turning it off and then on again has ever been an effective solution to an issue I’m having with it.

 

[JokoWidodo]

Its a recession in the US
Daddy tim must reduce the R&D money or else they will go bankrupt

 

[NC12]

Are you submitting this to feedback.apple.com or the feedback app?

Of course they won’t because if they did apple support would laugh as hard as the rest of us in this thread are

 

[dysamoria]

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

This is why we are in this situation. This is the very kind of rhetoric that helps keep things this way. We don’t just have a few annoying bugs. We have come to the point where software everywhere is in an abysmal state. It’s frail, unreliable, inconsistent… a house of cards. It’s poorly, if at all, managed. While so-called “AI” researchers and their companies are pushing literal black boxes as a solution to every non-problem, we have virtual black boxes as a bulk of code providing our operating systems, and almost anything else we rely on daily.

“You don’t understand software development/programming” … “we can’t have perfection”… blah blah blah.

So long as everyone keeps defending the status quo with special pleading logical fallacy excuses, nothing will improve.

At this point, it’s so bad, and the badness is so entrenched and normalized, that it would take massive legislation to mandate better practices. The laissez-faire capitalism religion of the USA will not allow that process to even start.

Tech people are a perfect example of a specific community where this ideology is entrenched and they self-police against anyone stepping in to say “hey, this is a problem”, to ensure that group-think is maintained…

…As what is already happening here…

 

[dysamoria]

Of course they won’t because if they did apple support would laugh as hard as the rest of us in this thread are

… and more of the pro-status quo group-think exemplified here…

 

[dysamoria]

macOS has more in common with Windows than people think.

Exactly. I left Windows because Apple’s Mac OS was a superior product.

It’s no longer that. It’s now just less bad…

…and it’s getting less less-bad as they keep pushing out more rushed, unfinished, untested, non-optimized, convoluted, and changed-for-no-good-reason releases.

 

[bollman]

Oh, but it gets worse!
We've seen that sometimes, a "restart" does not fix certain problems. That is due to Apple being "nice" and pausing your processes during a restart and continuing them after restart.
We've had hung processes that is not fixed by a restart. Since these are background stuff, unticking the box about restarting windows does nothing.
My guess is that this is "the future": restarting your mac will not fix anything since all processes will just pause during the restart and continue where they were afterwards.

 

[Seeds]

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.

What’s easier than restarting your phone? Apple only has so many people. It impossible to make everything perfect for every user.

 

[BanjoDudeAhoy]

Maybe my bug tolerance is higher than average because I work in gamedev with constantly broken tools. Or maybe I still have the constant restarts of my Windows days stuck in my head, but Mac restarts are so few and far between that they’ve never bothered me (so far).

 

[spac3duck]

macOS has more in common with Windows than people think.

In what way?

 

[frifra]

Restarting is fine, I think.
Resetting is far worse.

And that is one of the main answers for apples problem solutions. Had to reset my AirPods Pro 2 three times by now.

Of course that’s worse with an iPhone or Max.

 

[subzento]

This is the easiest way to solve the issue without bothering, especially since the device reloads in seconds, on the other hand I do not understand how it can hurt.

 

[throAU]

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

This is the way things are DESIGNED, but the implementation has bugs. Apple (or anyone else these days) doesn't intentionally require reboots to fix issues; they're a symptom of issues deep enough in the OS that recovery without re-start is not possible.

 

[splitpea]

A few seconds?

I work with a lot of open apps and files, and it takes 3-4 minutes to reboot and restore state on the 2019 MBA that’s my daily driver. It’s even more annoying because some apps fail to properly restore open windows. (I’m looking at you, Mail.app.). You also lose edit history (undo/redo) in open files.

It’s yet more frustrating because some apps can’t fully restore state OR history. (Ex: if you have multiple CLI shells open, you only get history for one restored to all of them; env vars get reset; remote shells get terminated; past output is just plain lost.)

Having to reboot is an enormous disruption to my work.

 

[JoshNori]

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.

You have every right to be frustrated. Their software is buggy and naggy as sin, and I deal with it every single day. I’m honestly getting really sick of it and have never been closer to moving to Android or nothing. Lately I’ve started embracing cash and simplicity, closed almost all of my credit cards, deleted all but required apps, using an iPhone SE, and I am happier because I’m calmer. The computer, phone, and total disrespect for sane communication by being just intruded upon with bug after bug and popup after popup and nag and cookie and update and 🤡😯😈😧🫤🤥😑😈😷 has become 90% of what makes me a neurotic apphole. It’s not my fault for wanting to take part of the advancements in civilization that is the smartphone. It’s THEIR fault for making it all proprietary and 💩y. There needs to be more community backlash and involvement when it comes to user experience.

 

[JoshNori]

This is the way things are DESIGNED, but the implementation has bugs. Apple (or anyone else these days) doesn't intentionally require reboots to fix issues; they're a symptom of issues deep enough in the OS that recovery without re-start is not possible.

It’s either main memory issues or bad high level programming. I encounter similar things constantly. It’s annoying as sin. It’s the Windows virus equivalent of macOS/iOS.

 

[orionquest]

The OP has something of a point. There are process's (background) which can only be fixed when they go south by a restart. Ever had safari start acting weird or unresponsive, a restart usually fixes that. Network hanging, or shares not mounting beach balling, restart will fix that.

The feedback on these types of issues is pretty non responsive from the OS other then user knowing there is something wrong by how they interact with it. Usually in the form of sluggish UI or beach balling.

When I used Windows more frequently back in the day, the Event Viewer was a great tool to review and see if anything exploded behind the scene. As far as I can tell MacOS doesn't have something like this.

Either way less bugs overall would make the OS better. As it's becoming more impossible to track down stuff when you keep tacking on more and more features, the OP's own admission to this issue is a pure example of the problem. It's like a ghost issue, they know it happens, hard to track down. Apple also doesn't do itself any favours by ramming down yearly updates with 100's of new features and yet previously broken stuff never get's any attention or updates to improve them. Rinse repeat and you have a mess of weird issues like this one.

 

[prime17569]

When I used Windows more frequently back in the day, the Event Viewer was a great tool to review and see if anything exploded behind the scene. As far as I can tell MacOS doesn't have something like this.

macOS has the Console app, but its filtering features, in my opinion, are subpar at best. (If you've ever tried to debug a Quick Look Extension, which is the modern replacement for Quick Look generators, you'll know what I mean.) This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that macOS is so complex, and does so many things in the background, that even doing nothing results in tens of messages being spewed into the log per second.

When filing a feedback report, Apple makes you send a sysdiagnose which includes these logs. So they certainly have the filtering tools to trawl through the logs, but they aren't available to the user.

 

[MayaUser]

next topic please
Live should be beautiful everyday, no worries, world peace

 

[hagjohn]

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.

Most electronic devices that have ever been created is often fixed by restarting. It isn't an Apple only thing.

 

[Apple2501]

It is annoying, less than ideal but, it’s life. Even organisms need a reboot. It’s called sleep. Expecting perfection from imperfection is folly.

 

[MauiPa]

I have none of the problems you describe, and I suspect most people don’t. It would be interesting to see if you did any troubleshooting or just think it is a universal issue

Now I will tell you I do a clean install with every major OS release in the event that some old libraries or gremlins are hanging around. I am also very careful not to get malware or download anything from sketchy sites. I do also clear my logs and remove junk files periodically. Finally I do shut down when not in use ( cause I’m a bit paranoid), and do not allow wake on network access

Hey it works

 

[dk001]

Wow. You must be new to using computers. Try using Windows if you hate restarting off and on.

I have to restart my Apple devices far more often than anything else I own.
Been that way for a couple of years now.

 

[imagineadam]

I restart my iPhone and watch every Sunday night before bed. Keeps everything running smooth. I don’t feel like this is a problem.

 

[Camarillo Brillo]

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?

How much ‘easier’ do you want it to be than a restart? I don’t understand the problem. Thats as easy of a solution as you’re going to get.