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

[splitpea]

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.

For 15+ years, Macs pretty much never had problems that would require a restart. You could go months at a time without restarting at all; years without restarting except to apply OS updates. It’d be nice if that were still the case.

What’s easier than a restart to solve a problem is not having the problem in the first place. And no, that’s not an impossibility, because it was the case for a really long time. Macs used to actually “just work” - it was more than a marketing slogan. “Did you try turning it off and then on again?” was a joke leveled at Windows users.

 

[macfacts]

I haven't had to restart my android device in a long time to get things to work

 

[MacDaddyPanda]

lol, but this is literally like Tech 101 troubleshooting. Restart, Reboot, power off and on. This isn't relegated to just Apple devices. Caveat ofc is you should probably only do this with consumer products. You don't want to just willy nilly restart a business critical server, lol. Or other mission critical component.

 

[throAU]

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.

Well not sure what I'm doing different, but my MacBook Pro 14" generally gets re-started for system updates and that's about it.


edit:
Maybe its because almost every app I have installed came from the App Store, where software is vetted and needs to play nice.

 

[rafark]

I’ve been using macs for a while and have almost never had to restart them, unlike windows.

 

[BenGoren]

… skipping to the end without reading everything in the middle to note: the original complaint amounts to an informal statement of Turing’s Halting Problem. Spoiler alert: it’s a provable mathematically unsolvable problem. You’ll have better luck squaring the circle, or finding a rational solution to x * x = 2.

b&

 

[alexbell]

Software gets more and more complex over time. And because of that it gets worse. Eventually there'll be a big rewrite that makes things even more unstable in the short term, but then slowly better. This isn't specific to Apple, but it sure feels like a lot of their software is in a bad part of this curve.

 

[mjs916]

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.

I’m more familiar with Windows. Is there a way to restart a process in MacOS like there is to restart Explorer.exe in Windows? What process is this?

 

[4389842]

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.

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

Apply for a job at Apple on the macOS or QA team! You seem to have great ideas on how to ‘fix Mac’!

Or you can always go Windows of course…

 

[4389842]

For 15+ years, Macs pretty much never had problems that would require a restart. You could go months at a time without restarting at all; years without restarting except to apply OS updates. It’d be nice if that were still the case.

It is still the case

 

[unrigestered]

I’m more familiar with Windows. Is there a way to restart a process in MacOS like there is to restart Explorer.exe in Windows? What process is this?

for things that will automatically restart by having something like a "keep alive" (or something like that) string inside their PLIST, which Finder and many OS related tasks do: either double click the process inside the Activity Monitor, which will give you the option to quit, or force quit it, or use OPTION + CMD + ESC that will give you a force quit menu for apps with a user interface (so no background system tasks)
or via the Terminal via killall <PROCESS> (killall Finder in this case)

you will have to restart that process manually later on for processes that don't have such a "keep alive" function enabled though

 

[samwa3]

~ % uptime
12:18  up 12 days, 21:04, 2 users, load averages: 2.75 3.57 3.63

Ventura 13.3.1 baby! (That's why I needed to restart 12 days ago.) And I'm using this computer 12 hrs per day. Have always been avoiding Microsoft software completely, though. That's probably it. But eh whatever device really I never have to restart anything.

 

[splitpea]

It is still the case

I’m glad you’re still having that experience. I’m not, and this thread suggests a lot of others aren’t either.

 

[Miha_v]

Thank god restart fixes 99% of problems on Apple devices. I still remember the times, when restart just showed a blue screen again.

 

[jagolden]

That's true. But they could certainly be better. Then again, perhaps I am experiencing a unique set of issues as explained in an earlier post.

I feel definitely a unique experience.
You’ve stated that these issues have happened across multiple laptops, Macs if I recall.
This just doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue, so my feeling is it’s an issue with some piece of third party software interfering with the MacOS.
Just how often does this actually happen?
I have loads of junk installed on my desktop (MBP M2 Max, 64gb, 2T), iPhone 14 PM, 12.9 iPP and iPad mini 5. The only time I perform a (hard) restart is when I update the operating systems, and then only when I remember to do it.
I’m sure this is frustrating for you. All you can do is keep searching for possible solutions.

 

[7149041]

Looking at you my Samsung TV

I love my Samsung TV and beamer but it's frustrating that sometimes you turn it on and it just refuses to connect to wifi. Then you need to do a voodoo ritual with pressing the power button on the remote for a long time and it goes back to normal. I mean, how hard is it to have the tv work after powering up?

 

[7149041]

My Intel Mac Pro had an uptime of ~3 months until a recent power disruption ruined it. If I had an emergency battery the record would keep going.

I do a lot of complex stuff on that machine, have a ton of third party apps and even more software compiled via brew and npm.

So just wondering, how much fault is there with software, how much with hardware (I personally consider M* Macs experimental at best and wouldn't use them for work) and how much is PEBKAC?

 

[7149041]

This just doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue, so my feeling is it’s an issue with some piece of third party software interfering with the MacOS.

Stuff like switchresx and others that interfere deeply with the OS can be problematic.

 

[Charlesrfinal]

Considering how reliable hardware and software have become since the days of the blue screen of death; I’d never complain now.

Can’t remember the last time I had to force restart my AW series 8, 14PM, or even my i7 Surface Pro 7 for that matter.

 

[ikramerica]

These are all very good points.

It's worth mentioning, though, that Apple sells a promise of "it just works," and people buy their products (and like me, develop apps for them) because of that. So when things randomly don't work, people begin to feel that they are reneging on that promise. (Thus the occasional "Apple software quality has gone down" threads we see.)

Yes, we can't expect things to be 100% bug-free, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating when things don't work for no apparent reason. If anything, there needs to be better communication with the user, especially as systems become more complex over time.

"it just works" died with Steve Jobs. Without a tyrant/genius walking the floor berating people who push through broken code, there will just be more broken code. Developers are lazy like that.

 

[ikramerica]

For 15+ years, Macs pretty much never had problems that would require a restart. You could go months at a time without restarting at all; years without restarting except to apply OS updates. It’d be nice if that were still the case.

What’s easier than a restart to solve a problem is not having the problem in the first place. And no, that’s not an impossibility, because it was the case for a really long time. Macs used to actually “just work” - it was more than a marketing slogan. “Did you try turning it off and then on again?” was a joke leveled at Windows users.

That is very true. There were posts all the time about uptime counting in months and years. Of course, there wasn't always a new OS "version" yearly and fewer zero day exploits to explore. The move to everything cloud meant the days of long uptime went bye-bye.

That said, I had a bug in a previous OS version where every update, not matter how minor, forced a complete recovery reinstall of the OS. I didn't do it, the system would do it itself. So a simple reboot meant a LONG downtime if the reboot involved any updates, even delayed install updates. Fun.

 

[raythompsontn]

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

I am going to guess you have never written software, let alone very complicated software. It is impossible to test, or account for, billions of possible combinations of events and states. It becomes even more difficult when external events can interrupt processes. A multi-tasking environment adds multiple layers of complication. One little mistake, expecting a variable to be zero, when somewhere, somehow a one got planted in that memory location.

Even the Apollo computer, a very primitive computer by today's standards, occasionally needed to be restarted. The hardware was probably the most reliable computer hardware ever built. That operating system, and application modules, were probably the most heavily tested and vetted software that was ever written. A mistake in that software could be very deadly. Yet sometimes a restart was required. It happens.

 

[4389842]

I’m glad you’re still having that experience. I’m not, and this thread suggests a lot of others aren’t either.

Like what?

 

[zilchfox]

Lmao… what? You need to restart all electronics sometimes, for various reasons. It really is the best troubleshooting tip.

 

[prime17569]

I am going to guess you have never written software, let alone very complicated software. It is impossible to test, or account for, billions of possible combinations of events and states. It becomes even more difficult when external events can interrupt processes. A multi-tasking environment adds multiple layers of complication. One little mistake, expecting a variable to be zero, when somewhere, somehow a one got planted in that memory location.

Even the Apollo computer, a very primitive computer by today's standards, occasionally needed to be restarted. The hardware was probably the most reliable computer hardware ever built. That operating system, and application modules, were probably the most heavily tested and vetted software that was ever written. A mistake in that software could be very deadly. Yet sometimes a restart was required. It happens.

The Apollo computer is an interesting example. It apparently got overwhelmed while the lunar module was landing on Apollo 11, but was able to recover quickly enough that the historic landing went off without a hitch. It didn't actually restart fully; all it did was automatically restart the non-essential jobs so that there was enough headroom available for the landing calculations, without needing to restart the entire system.

Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal: Program Alarms