Apple Seeds Fourth OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan Beta to Developers

[MrNomNoms]

For whatever it's worth: AirDrop and the other Continuity stuff such as Handoff was extremely flakey for me in the iOS 8 / OS X 10.10 era, but somewhere around iOS 9.2 / OS X 10.11.2-ish, things just started working. As recently as October, so well into iOS 9 and OS X 10.11, I still had bizarre situations where an iPad, an iPhone and a Mac, all right next to each other, don't fully see each other — e.g., the Mac and iPad see each other, the iPhone sees both, but neither see the iPhone. But these situations do seem — knock on wood — to be resolved now. Even temporarily switching to the old protocol to get my old Mac, then switching back to get the iOS devices again seems to work within mere seconds of delay. Again, this was terribly, frustratingly broken for me even in a bizarrely simple setup, on two entirely different Wi-Fi network infrastructures (i.e., both at home and at work). Even once you left out iOS entirely and instead had two Macs communicate each other — randomly, one saw the other, but not vice versa.

Thus, I would hesitantly encourage you to give it another shot.

I've given it many goes and unfortunately I'm still very much stuck in the situation of those features not working. Continuity I'm not too fussed about given that I've never used it but AirDrop is a big feature for me because it allows me to quickly send files between my Mac and iPhone - it is the one big thing that keeps me in the ecosystem because of that integration but when that integration doesn't work then combine it with the improving situation in the Windows world then I have to ask "why am I still here".

So, with that fundamental, massive issue improved tremendously for me, possibly even fixed entirely, I can move on to actually criticizing the UI. The Contacts Only vs. Everyone UI is a clever choice, but I'm not happy with the implications it has with receiving shared data. Apparently, it means that for contacts, you automatically get the data (potentially switching apps, kicking you out of whatever you were doing), whether you like it or not. An extra "Trust this device to send me useful data" toggle on the receiving end, with a better label explaining the implications seems like a good idea to me.

You what would make me happy if Apple just included a 'sync' button so then it isn't a gamble as to whether everything has been sync'ed to the cloud; just a sync button on 'System Preferences' where I can click on iCloud then go 'Sync' the everything syncs and if there are conflicts there is a message box that comes up saying that there is a conflict and it asks me how I would like it resolved.

As for other network issues, well… there is a single other Mac in this home network. As I'm typing this, Finder doesn't acknowledge it. I could manually connect to it with Connect to Server, but I shouldn't have to. I can make random OS X networking things go poof (and mostly just quietly relaunch itself) by typing 'sudo killall networkd networkd_privileged netbiosd DiskUnmountWatcher NetAuthAgent NetAuthSysAgent Finder CFNetworkAgent' and immediately have it show up in Finder, but I shouldn't have to. This was broken way back in the 10.1 Puma era when I first tinkered around a little with OS X, and Apple still can't seem to get it right.

Agreed - I expected things to actually improve once they moved to standardise on SMB so then all the developer muscle could be dedicated to making SMB work well but alas here we are 4 years later and SMB support is still a mess after the re-write. One can kind of understand how things might be mediocre when they were dependent on SAMBA given that they were trying to retrofit it into Finder but with the re-write I was hoping that it would allow Apple to talk directly to Microsoft and licence technology so that it was SMB compliant based on Apple being able to talk to Microsoft.

The biggest problem with Windows 10 at this stage isn't the underlying fundamentals but the UI which is gradually being resolved - Project Centennial will mean that Win32 applications will get delivered in self contained boxes which avoids the registry rot, the rapid release schedule means that updates are coming out regularly rather than long periods of time between updates, hardware support is being pushed through the Windows update which avoids a lot of the crap that has built up etc. So Apple really need to step up their game because the complaints that many had of Windows which justified their migration to Apple are either no longer true or are being addressed in Red Stone. For Apple to hold onto customers they need to lift their game.

 

[osang]

Maybe this is the problem with Apple's quality, having all of their OS variants on the same release train forces the company to split focus. Why is OS X, iOS, TVOs and WatchOS all being seeded together?

This is another reason why Apple needs to drop the stupidity and unify the OS'es if they are going to tie them altogether anyways. One common kernel would make sense that all devices are updated together, but having 4 variations of the OS tied to the same release train is why you end up with some of the glaring security holes and bugs found on every release.

Also stop using the beta seeds as quality control. Most people getting these seeds are just fanbois wanting to brag about having Apple's newest features and this does not translate to an honest and focused quality process.

 

[jackiechiles]

Anyone having issues with the system completely freezing for 10-60 seconds when closing YouTube tabs in Safari? It's related to GPU switching, so it only applies to dual GPU machines such as the 15 inch MacBook Pro.
Sure hope this fixes that, because it's been 3 versions now and they still haven't addressed this.

This has been an issue since el capitan was released. So far no progress has been made to fix it. I've reported it over 5 times and every time they close my bug report... I am using a 13 inch retina macbook pro from 2014.

 

[jb-net]

Focus Areas

• iBooks
• Messages
• Notes
• Photos

Why not Mail? Mail.app needs a lot of focus having so much serious problems! When will Apple fix it?

 

[campyguy]

That's not a solution. Your shortcut would make everything, either copied or cut to ALWAYS be moved. You need to CMD+X shortcut to make it a solution. Apple refuses to do it.

YOU need Command-X for a solution, I don't. I have mine already.

 

[APlotdevice]

It aint natural and incorrect. Cut/paste to movie something is universally known as cmd+x/cmd+v. Apple being their typical 'think different' asshats have to go against the standard. It's stupid. And if they dont want to abide by universal standards, at least give us the OPTION to change it in system preferences.

What's so bad about an option to change as I suggested earlier?

What is "natural" about cutting or pasting a file? These terms make sense for things like text and photos... in the paper medium you would "cut" part of a paper out with scissors, then "paste" it somewhere else with glue... but try applying them to a file and they sound absolutely ludicrous! Also, Apple is not exactly some new player. Many of its "non-standard" keyboard shortcuts were established when Windows was still getting off the ground.

Honestly, it's not that hard to remember different shortcuts between different operating systems.

 

[verpeiler]

It aint natural and incorrect. Cut/paste to movie something is universally known as cmd+x/cmd+v. Apple being their typical 'think different' asshats have to go against the standard. It's stupid. And if they dont want to abide by universal standards, at least give us the OPTION to change it in system preferences.

What's so bad about an option to change as I suggested earlier?

Not true at all. Looks like you're a windows user, that's all. There's no universal standard.

I'm an ex Windows user myself and had no problems to adapt to OSX. In fact Microsoft changed some things in the 80s and 90s probably to be different from Apple.

 

[amors]

That's not a solution. Your shortcut would make everything, either copied or cut to ALWAYS be moved. You need to CMD+X shortcut to make it a solution. Apple refuses to do it.

Windows will help you.

 

[osxrumours]

Anyone having issues with the system completely freezing for 10-60 seconds when closing YouTube tabs in Safari? It's related to GPU switching, so it only applies to dual GPU machines such as the 15 inch MacBook Pro.
Sure hope this fixes that, because it's been 3 versions now and they still haven't addressed this.

Yes, desperately waiting for a fix for this. Apple has had this reported to them countless times (look at the messages about this on the Apple support discussions) and don't acknowledge knowing about the issue. They just make the customer wipe and reinstall the laptop when this hasn't fixed the issue for anyone who has it. It's inherent from the laptop first arriving. The lack of a fix in each point release makes me worry it's a hardware issue that needs replacing.

 

[Steve121178]

Why not Mail? Mail.app needs a lot of focus having so much serious problems! When will Apple fix it?

What problems are you having?

 

[bladerunner2000]

YOU need Command-X for a solution, I don't. I have mine already.

Nobody cares about what YOU don't need. I'm raising the point of what many OTHERS have been begging Apple to do for years.

Are you opposed to having Apple add an option in system preferences that even YOU would never notice?
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What is "natural" about cutting or pasting a file? These terms make sense for things like text and photos... in the paper medium you would "cut" part of a paper out with scissors, then "paste" it somewhere else with glue... but try applying them to a file and they sound absolutely ludicrous! Also, Apple is not exactly some new player. Many of its "non-standard" keyboard shortcuts were established when Windows was still getting off the ground.

Honestly, it's not that hard to remember different shortcuts between different operating systems.

Natural? So, having to play the piano with the keyboard just to move a file is natural? Why are you opposed to simplifying the move file command so it's in line with everything else?

Tell you what, let's not even make it a default command of cmd+x/cmd+v, are you STILL going to be opposed to it if it's an option in system preferences? Something tells me you still won't like that... for whatever stubborn reason.

 

[Ebenezum]

Downloading right now...
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Sorry, but an added "Implemented NSA backdoor" just doesn't read so good in the Release Notes...

I would love to see the day Apple would include that in release notes...

I guess they just don't want to give specific information... it's been this diffuse "improvements to mail, photos.." blabla for a long time now.

I know. Its very annoying because current way of doing it will tell nothing worthwhile and apparently I'm supposed to develop mind reading skills to find out what has changed in update?

In all due respect, no one is railing against adding new features but when there are fundamental problems being left unaddressed and have plagued OS X users for almost 3-4 and sometimes 5 years I certainly don't blame the likes of kagharaht getting a bit annoyed at the current state of affairs. What is even more annoying is when they do add features they're broken or half complete - Metal for example is only partially implemented and not fully optimised resulting in performance no better than OpenGL, then there are features that Apple promote to give them an edge over the competition such as AirDrop that fail to work, Wifi Syncing for iTunes is something that I gave up on years ago because the performance was atrocious not to mention the iffy reliability.

I agree.

Some examples: Time Machine has been unreliable for years, Finder works properly only on good days on 10.10-10.11, Spotlight consumes way too much resources and its not reliable (trouble started in 10.9, much worse in 10.10-10.11).

As for new features I have nothing against them provided that A: they are beneficial and B: bug fixing should be higher priority compared to adding new features. El Capitan was supposed to be bug fix release but I am not impressed.

 

[ScooterComputer]

Why not Mail? Mail.app needs a lot of focus having so much serious problems! When will Apple fix it?

What problems are you having?

Spotlight consumes way too much resources and its not reliable (trouble started in 10.9, much worse in 10.10-10.11).

I think there is a high correlation between the two of these, and it might go a long way to having folks like Steve121178 understand the situation better. Mail post-10.9 uses Spotlight, I THINK, to handle mailbox views. Corruption in Spotlight data means Mail fails…badly. Users don't get new mail, don't get new mail in a timely manner, don't SEE any mail at all for long durations of time when switching mailboxes, etc. And the Rebuild Mailboxes typical troubleshooting doesn't work. The problems just come back. It wasn't until I started clearing Spotlight data on drives of affected users that I saw improvement. But it is always temporary.

Many posters here and on other sites point fingers at Google…or the number of IMAP accounts…or the number of mail messages…or the size of the mail store…or…or…or…they just keep pointing fingers. Mail still, after 3 years, is fundamentally broken. I'm glad for you if works fine for you, great. But I've seen too many clients frustrated to the point of moving back to Outlook (or worse for us all, Outlook on Windows) with Mail…I've had to deal with Mail's problems first hand as a consultant, they're real. Maybe a lot of people don't rely on email anymore, whatever (I don't buy that, but whatever), however there is a large, moneyed segment of the business computing market that does. Apple's inability to remedy these core issues has been very detrimental. I've seen it. Personally, I don't have the issues, I count my self lucky. Yet mail does spit fairly unhelpful stuff occasionally into logs; that the errors are so vague make them unhelpful, though gives me the impression that character encoding or parsing issues (like malformed dates?) might be causing Spotlight cache corruption…which leads to broken mailbox viewing.

But even past that, I have filed more than a dozen bugs against Mail, for various issues from performance to UX to feature enhancements. Some of those bugs are nearly 5 years old. Most have been closed as duplicate or "engineering is aware and following". None have been fixed. Not one. And none of my afflicted clients, some of whom have upgraded from Mac OS 10.8 to 10.11 in hopes of resolution, have yet gotten a mail app that simply displays their mail properly and as expected. (ironically, we've determined that iOS Mail doesn't suffer from the issues, at least not as detrimentally; one client sits at his desk, in front of his iMac, with an iPad Air to do his email. This man has spend more than $30,000 on Apple gear for his firm in the past 5 years…can't get mail to work right on his iMac. Think about that.) I can watch Mail, via Activity, from a fresh Mac OS 10.11.3 install reading several IMAP/Gmail IMAP accounts and see the mailbox-checking threads CROSSING threads and threads getting stuck in mailbox re-entry loops (the Spam box loop is especially funny to watch…because WHO CARES??). This isn't good code, folks. It is spaghetti, a rat's nest. And it is absolutely unacceptable.

 

[Summersify]

Yes, desperately waiting for a fix for this. Apple has had this reported to them countless times (look at the messages about this on the Apple support discussions) and don't acknowledge knowing about the issue. They just make the customer wipe and reinstall the laptop when this hasn't fixed the issue for anyone who has it. It's inherent from the laptop first arriving. The lack of a fix in each point release makes me worry it's a hardware issue that needs replacing.

I went to the Apple store and they ended up replacing the entire motherboard, and it still hasn't fixed the issue. I think it is something inherent with El Capitan unfortunately

 

[star-affinity]

I went to the Apple store and they ended up replacing the entire motherboard, and it still hasn't fixed the issue. I think it is something inherent with El Capitan unfortunately

And what about the latest 10.11.4 beta? No improvemennt?

 

[Summersify]

And what about the latest 10.11.4 beta? No improvemennt?

No, there's no change through all 4 of the betas. If anything, the betas of 10.11.4 elicit more freezes than some of the previous releases with El Capitan. I have extensively studied the crash dumps, but I just can't seem to work out why it freezes when it does (and neither could Apple it seems, otherwise they wouldn't have given me £600 of repairs for free!).

 

[lionkin]

Anybody is having wifi issue? or It's just my end.

 

[aiglesias_]

I would like Apple to finally start including detailed listing of changes and bug fixes in 10.11.4 once it is released. I am not expecting miracles but the information that Apple has provided for 10.11.1-11.1.3 is seriously lacking to say the least...

Is it really too much to ask given the Apples resources?

This is the general page of the 10.11.3 update, no specific info, but links to:

• This page with a bit more info.
• And this page with under-the-hood fixes listed.

So why you say they give no details on the updates?

 

[navaira]

Beta 4 took care of Photoshop beachballs! Great, I was worried they were here to stay, and that the Air is somehow just too slow.

 

[Ebenezum]

This is the general page of the 10.11.3 update, no specific info, but links to:

• This page with a bit more info.
• And this page with under-the-hood fixes listed.

So why you say they give no details on the updates?

I know both of those pages. It seems we have different idea what "details" means because first page gives extremely limited information. Second page contains security information for 10.9-10.11 which isn't the same as detailed release notes because Apple used to release much more detailed notes for previous OS X updates some years ago.

I don't know why latest OS X versions have had much less information, maybe Apple feels most of their customers don't need details? If so that is very unfortunate because I use Macs professionally and I need more information before I decide to install updates.

 

[osxrumours]

This has been an issue since el capitan was released. So far no progress has been made to fix it. I've reported it over 5 times and every time they close my bug report... I am using a 13 inch retina macbook pro from 2014.

I've been following and commenting in a few threads at the apple support forums. I've been having this issue (freezing of system UI when closing/switching a tab in safari that's playing a html5 video) in Yosemite also, on a factory fresh 2014 rMBP. Others have had it in Yosemite too, just appears to be more common in El Capitan.

 

[ajgaspard]

Anybody is having wifi issue? or It's just my end.

I am experiencing problems with wifi .... Extremely slow... I connected through the Ethernet port and it works flawlessly...

Got connected to a different network in a different place (to discard wifi router issues) and the problem remains...

Any thoughts??

 

[aiglesias_]

I know both of those pages. It seems we have different idea what "details" means because first page gives extremely limited information. Second page contains security information for 10.9-10.11 which isn't the same as detailed release notes because Apple used to release much more detailed notes for previous OS X updates some years ago.

I don't know why latest OS X versions have had much less information, maybe Apple feels most of their customers don't need details? If so that is very unfortunate because I use Macs professionally and I need more information before I decide to install updates.

My point is maybe there's no other content in the update other than security patches to low-level libraries. That's my guess of course. In the case of newer features they'll be listed on the first page I think.

 

[Ebenezum]

My point is maybe there's no other content in the update other than security patches to low-level libraries. That's my guess of course. In the case of newer features they'll be listed on the first page I think.

That may be the case for 10.11.3 but Apple has been releasing less information about the recent updates compared to 10.8 and 10.9. I don't know why but it is very disappointing, its not practical to dig through developer notes hoping to piece together all the changes that impact the software I need. Its baffling why Apple doesn't include those details in a detailed article. That information should be included in the release notes...

 

[ScooterComputer]

I've been following and commenting in a few threads at the apple support forums. I've been having this issue (freezing of system UI when closing/switching a tab in safari that's playing a html5 video) in Yosemite also, on a factory fresh 2014 rMBP. Others have had it in Yosemite too, just appears to be more common in El Capitan.

I just noticed today using Little Snitch on 10.9.5 and Safari 9.0.3 that Safari Web Content remains as an active process "long" after a tab to YouTube and playing a HTML5 video gets closed, pulling significant amount of data. I wonder if this problem is more widespread. I don't necessarily see UI slowdown, but there is sluggishness until that process finishes up doing whatever it is doing and finally closes.