Equally surprised here as well, so far all the slowdowns I've been experiencing before seems to have dissipated. Please God let this be the end of my High Sierra headaches.
Also note to self: Don't update to a new MacOS until its X.X.4th update.
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Is anyone unhappy with High Sierra?
- Thread starter tpcollins
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Equally surprised here as well, so far all the slowdowns I've been experiencing before seems to have dissipated. Please God let this be the end of my High Sierra headaches.
Also note to self: Don't update to a new MacOS until its X.X.4th update.
I still don't know what the issue was. I had to reinstall macOS, and that went without issue. Things have been OK since. *shrug*. But it was the first time I've ever had an issue.
I’ve been underwhelmed. Safari beach balls every I load it, which it never did before, and the memory management seems wonky. I have 16GB. When I wake the computer to work on it in the morning available memory will be at about 2GB with no apps running except Messages and Reminders running. Swipe to look at Reminders and appointments and the Reminders appear, then disappear for 5 seconds or so until they reappear. Very annoying.
Yea, maybe APFS is the root of some of these problems with High Sierra. Again, I don't like the fact that they're attempting to force it on us. If you want to stick with HFS+, be ready to open Terminal, and for a lot (most?) people, that is a non-starter.
I'll just stick to Sierra and revisit at 10.13.5.
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Hah! I think you're the only other person who thought in terms of RAM, yea. I, too, have wondered why the extra RAM (I had 8GB before this laptop) of even faster RAM did not seem to make much of a difference with Safari. Also don't have other applications open. And a quad-core i7 I guess doesn't matter either. And didn't Apple advertise that Safari utilizes the fast graphics as well? I'm not sure on that one though. And...well, whatever. Sticking with what works: 10.12.6.
Hell yea they were, I remember the days of Windows XP compared to Snow Leopard was like night and day. What a lovely OS it was (and still is!), then 10.9 Mavericks which was after right after 10.6.8 regarding the quality.
Todays High Sierra is something like 10.7 back in the days. I'm very unhappy with the quality even compared to Sierra. Random hangs and other issues on brand new Macbook Pro 15'' 17 which just a minimal setup, no trashy apps and monitors or other crap installed. I was expecting more fluid experience, instead I'm getting a laggy OS which is way worse than it's predecessors.
Shame on you Apple. And on top of that - my keyboard issue starts to show up, so 3 weeks old Macbook Pro will go for the warranty repair sooner or later - which is great!
Have been on High Sierra ever since the third or fourth public beta with a 2017 iMac. Yes, in the early days I experienced quite a bit of hiccups, lag, and hangups, but at least in my case, Apple really seem to have ironed everything out. Even mission control zooms in and out perfectly now. Mostly use Apple apps, except for Nord VPN (24/7) and Visual Studio Code. Windows on my dual-boot, however, is an absolute mess.
In my personal opinion High Sierra should be avoided on Macs with SSDs at all costs for a very simple yet astonishingly braindead reason: while Apple is forcibly converting all SSD-enabled Macs from HFS+ to APFS without notifying the user beforehand they have until today failed to provide proper APFS documentation for developers and professionals. In other words: should something go wrong with your APFS-enabled drive you're pretty much screwed as there are no data rescue/file recovery tools that know how to handle APFS. Personally, that is a red line for me.
That said my personal experience with High Sierra is something of a mixed bag. I first updated my 2016 13" MacBook Pro from Sierra (10.12.6) to High Sierra in December 2017 (not aware of the lack of APFS documentation) and then subsequently carried that installation over onto a 2015 15" MacBook Pro via Time Machine. Ever since updating I've had massive trouble on both MacBook Pros with Bluetooth devices - headset and mouse would annoy the living c**p out of each other to the point where the headset was showing signs of loss of connectivity when I was moving the mouse or the mouse was stuttering after I powered on the headset; my VPN connections required a several minute long wait before I was able to successfully reconnect after putting my Mac to sleep; the login screen was completely frozen for around 10 seconds almost every time I woke the MBP from sleep; my audio output devices suddenly and randomly changed without any sort of interaction on my part - e.g. while playing music and working in, say Excel, the OS would all of a sudden decide all by itself to switch from my external USB speakers to my Bluetooth headset for default audio output; several third-party applications kept crashing and had to be force quit regularly, among others 3CX soft phone, Outlook 2016, or Remote Desktop. In addition, 3CX soft phone crash and froze almost every time I woke the Mac from sleep. Long story short I went back to 10.12.6 after suffering and hoping for things to improve in early March when I accidentally stumbled upon the APFS documentation issue. The MacBook Pro was my one and only computer and as a self-employed Linux/UNIX operations consultant & developer my livelihood depended on it. Long story short the switch back to Sierra solved every single one of my issues.
Fast forward to Mid April and I got rid of the 2015 MBP because its fans were starting to drive me nuts. Since I don't travel for my job as often as I used to anymore I've decided to go with a stationary desktop computer for the first time since 2009, and have thus replaced the single 15" MBP with a 2017 5K iMac for my office and a 2017 MacBook for the road, both of which came with 10.13.4 preloaded out of the box. Given that my main computer would now be the iMac I was not concerned about the lack of APFS documentation anymore - it sports a Fusion Drive and thus remained on HFS+. The MacBook, on the other hand, came with APFS and I thus do not trust it to hold any important files or data - I really only use it when I'm out and about and make sure to either store everything in some sort of cloud storage right away or move everything off the APFS and onto the HFS+ drive as soon as I get back home. And truth be told with 10.13.4 and now 10.13.5 all my previous issues have all but disappeared, except for the 10 second freeze upon wake: for some reason the MacBook does the same thing as both MacBook Pros before. And this time, I have NOT restored it from backup at all since it's considered untrustworthy and more like an iPad to me that is not allowed to hold any data (hence there was no need to restore anything from backup anyway). Makes me think it could be somehow related to APFS since the iMac with High Sierra and HFS+ doesn't show this behavior at all. It's not a big deal but more of an annoyance.
That isn't to say that High Sierra is now completely bug free, quite the contrary. Earlier this week (on Tuesday morning) I dared to finally enable FileVault on my iMac. Boy was that a mistake... First, the reboot required for enabling FileVault ended with the infamous crossed-out circle and the Mac didn't even boot to single user mode anymore. I had to manually unlock my drive using the Terminal while booted from Recovery to fix it; then, somewhen on Tuesday afternoon, the iMac froze completely on me and I had to hard reset it. On Tuesday night it crashed again while in standby (sleep/wake failure), which meant I had to boot it up from scratch on Wednesday morning. Ever since everything was hunky dory again.
At the end of the day I would probably still advise anyone to avoid High Sierra due to its many inconsistencies, annoyances, bugs, and most prominently the lack of APFS documentation. For me personally my laziness got the best of me and I've decided to ride it out for now and put all my eggs in the 10.14 basket.
That said my personal experience with High Sierra is something of a mixed bag. I first updated my 2016 13" MacBook Pro from Sierra (10.12.6) to High Sierra in December 2017 (not aware of the lack of APFS documentation) and then subsequently carried that installation over onto a 2015 15" MacBook Pro via Time Machine. Ever since updating I've had massive trouble on both MacBook Pros with Bluetooth devices - headset and mouse would annoy the living c**p out of each other to the point where the headset was showing signs of loss of connectivity when I was moving the mouse or the mouse was stuttering after I powered on the headset; my VPN connections required a several minute long wait before I was able to successfully reconnect after putting my Mac to sleep; the login screen was completely frozen for around 10 seconds almost every time I woke the MBP from sleep; my audio output devices suddenly and randomly changed without any sort of interaction on my part - e.g. while playing music and working in, say Excel, the OS would all of a sudden decide all by itself to switch from my external USB speakers to my Bluetooth headset for default audio output; several third-party applications kept crashing and had to be force quit regularly, among others 3CX soft phone, Outlook 2016, or Remote Desktop. In addition, 3CX soft phone crash and froze almost every time I woke the Mac from sleep. Long story short I went back to 10.12.6 after suffering and hoping for things to improve in early March when I accidentally stumbled upon the APFS documentation issue. The MacBook Pro was my one and only computer and as a self-employed Linux/UNIX operations consultant & developer my livelihood depended on it. Long story short the switch back to Sierra solved every single one of my issues.
Fast forward to Mid April and I got rid of the 2015 MBP because its fans were starting to drive me nuts. Since I don't travel for my job as often as I used to anymore I've decided to go with a stationary desktop computer for the first time since 2009, and have thus replaced the single 15" MBP with a 2017 5K iMac for my office and a 2017 MacBook for the road, both of which came with 10.13.4 preloaded out of the box. Given that my main computer would now be the iMac I was not concerned about the lack of APFS documentation anymore - it sports a Fusion Drive and thus remained on HFS+. The MacBook, on the other hand, came with APFS and I thus do not trust it to hold any important files or data - I really only use it when I'm out and about and make sure to either store everything in some sort of cloud storage right away or move everything off the APFS and onto the HFS+ drive as soon as I get back home. And truth be told with 10.13.4 and now 10.13.5 all my previous issues have all but disappeared, except for the 10 second freeze upon wake: for some reason the MacBook does the same thing as both MacBook Pros before. And this time, I have NOT restored it from backup at all since it's considered untrustworthy and more like an iPad to me that is not allowed to hold any data (hence there was no need to restore anything from backup anyway). Makes me think it could be somehow related to APFS since the iMac with High Sierra and HFS+ doesn't show this behavior at all. It's not a big deal but more of an annoyance.
That isn't to say that High Sierra is now completely bug free, quite the contrary. Earlier this week (on Tuesday morning) I dared to finally enable FileVault on my iMac. Boy was that a mistake... First, the reboot required for enabling FileVault ended with the infamous crossed-out circle and the Mac didn't even boot to single user mode anymore. I had to manually unlock my drive using the Terminal while booted from Recovery to fix it; then, somewhen on Tuesday afternoon, the iMac froze completely on me and I had to hard reset it. On Tuesday night it crashed again while in standby (sleep/wake failure), which meant I had to boot it up from scratch on Wednesday morning. Ever since everything was hunky dory again.
At the end of the day I would probably still advise anyone to avoid High Sierra due to its many inconsistencies, annoyances, bugs, and most prominently the lack of APFS documentation. For me personally my laziness got the best of me and I've decided to ride it out for now and put all my eggs in the 10.14 basket.
I had a TimeMachine Issue in 10.13.4, so I switched to CCC and love it compared to TM.
Initially 10.13.4 felt slower to me after the conversion to APFS, but I found the issue. The upgrade left my SSD in a state where lots of Trimming of unused blocks were needed. I didn’t give it enough time before evaluating things. I just noticed drive access was slightly reduced and was a little disappointed. Then after pondering on it a bit, I decided to force a full drive Trimming and BOOM performance was at a minimum equal to HFS+ and at best a little quicker.
Am I unhappy with HS?
Not at all, and 10.13.5 feels very polished. Really enjoying it.
Initially 10.13.4 felt slower to me after the conversion to APFS, but I found the issue. The upgrade left my SSD in a state where lots of Trimming of unused blocks were needed. I didn’t give it enough time before evaluating things. I just noticed drive access was slightly reduced and was a little disappointed. Then after pondering on it a bit, I decided to force a full drive Trimming and BOOM performance was at a minimum equal to HFS+ and at best a little quicker.
Am I unhappy with HS?
Not at all, and 10.13.5 feels very polished. Really enjoying it.
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Funny how after El Capitan they stopped allowing user reviews on the app store ??
From what I've read HS is an unmitigated disaster and best avoided
WHY do we have to have annual MACos upgrades ???
From what I've read HS is an unmitigated disaster and best avoided
WHY do we have to have annual MACos upgrades ???
HS still sucks. Apple needs to go back to a 2 year cycle for MacOS.
10.4 was great
10.5 was slow and buggy to begin with but got better
10.6 was great
10.7 was slow and buggy to being with but got better
10.8 was great
10.9 was slow and buggy and never got better
10.10 was surprisingly good
10.11 was great
10.12 was buggy to begin with but got better
10.13 has been hopeless.
10.4 was great
10.5 was slow and buggy to begin with but got better
10.6 was great
10.7 was slow and buggy to being with but got better
10.8 was great
10.9 was slow and buggy and never got better
10.10 was surprisingly good
10.11 was great
10.12 was buggy to begin with but got better
10.13 has been hopeless.
My personal problem with High Sierra is windowserver and kernel_task eating CPU constantly.
I tried to troubleshoot, what more can I do than install a fresh copy and see those processes starting to eat 10-15% CPU all the time? I went online, searched for answers, people have the same issue, tried all fix attempts, didn't work at all.
Switch back to Sierra and everything is fine?
So what conclusion should I end up with? Tell me fanboys who talk about "all you do is rant and complain, but you didn't try fixing the issue"? Is this supposed to be normal for a $2k machine? The OS just sucks.
I tried to troubleshoot, what more can I do than install a fresh copy and see those processes starting to eat 10-15% CPU all the time? I went online, searched for answers, people have the same issue, tried all fix attempts, didn't work at all.
Switch back to Sierra and everything is fine?
So what conclusion should I end up with? Tell me fanboys who talk about "all you do is rant and complain, but you didn't try fixing the issue"? Is this supposed to be normal for a $2k machine? The OS just sucks.
but yes, you're right about this: "My personal problem"... as not all of us have this issue. what version of HS were you running? 10.13.5 is great here...
I'm running 10.13.5 here without any problems. I'm NOT unhappy with it. 
Why is it that if you are having good results with Apple anything, you get called a fanboy in a derogatory context, and if you are reporting a problem that YOU have, Apple is crap?
I guess people who have no issues are supposed to keep that a secret unless they want to be labeled as a fanboy.
I guess people who have no issues are supposed to keep that a secret unless they want to be labeled as a fanboy.
if i'm having a good experience, i'll often post about it. if i'm having an issue, i'll definitely post about it. i AM an apple fanboy...when things work. when they don't, i'm an apple fanboy who's angry or upset about the particular problem.
if a problem isn't global, ie if everone ISN'T having it, then it's specific, and should be discussed. what i find frustrating is the whiners, the 'sky is falling' theorists; the ones who decide we ALL have whatever problem they're having.
at the end of the day, everyone on this forum is an apple fanboy; it's the reason they own a mac (or they are until they move to another OS).
think of the great discussions that happen on this forum, then imagine if there was a 'whining' filter; we could get to the point, and help each other out, and so on...
If there was such a filter we'd be left with a couple of sticky threads in most of the forums, particularly the iPhone and Mac Pro ones
Come on, @fisherking! You're better than that. You're attacking someone who is sharing genuine High Sierra experiences, as many others have shared.
What I'd like to know from you is how the hell is 10.13.5 and .6b1? I'm looking forward to having a look at 10.14 tomorrow. What will Apple force on us next? What creepy little scheme will they have baked into iOS 12 for us? in iOS 11, it was "oh, can't turn off WiFi completely without jumping through extra hoops".
you mean, responding to this? "Tell me fanboys who talk about "all you do is rant and complain, but you didn't try fixing the issue"? Is this supposed to be normal for a $2k machine? The OS just sucks."
anyway, have had a great time with 10.13.5, and the 10.13.6beta seems about the same (i think logic X is running even better on the beta)...
Sigh...ok, High Sierra is the best macOS ever! There.
So if 10.14 is merely a bug fix release, it should theoretically be stable right out of the gate, shouldn't it? Ahh, but the world doesn't work that way, does it.
Just give me system-wide Dark Mode, Apple!!! Give it to me.
Had the problem I mentioned above with first release of High Sierra. Fine, it was not ready yet, I went back to Sierra to do my work. Tried again with 10.13.3, still same issue. Sierra, absolutely no problem. I paid the extra money for this computer to avoid problems like these on Windows, to do my work. I paid for better hardware/software, with subpar performance, but fine, I was expecting the OS to be solid. All I am saying is I am disappointed with what's happening currently. Sketch and Web development are the only things keeping me on a Mac. Everytime someone asks me if Apple computers are good I do not recommend them anymore because they are just not worth the money anymore.
Very happy for the people running HS fine, but I've had my experiences with Apple's fanboism on Reddit especially where a post of mine got taken down because I dared to post a video of how an iMac Pro in an Apple Shop was struggling to maximise a window on HS.
And this is mostly what I hate about, very few people dare to say "I don't have many problems, but I do admit HS has the most complaints to this day and ironically it was about performance and bug fixes, nothing major, Higher Sierra".
Because this is my experience, take out the fact that I have a personal, isolated problem with my mac, I follow these forums since Yosemite and this OS took the most ****.
Very happy for the people running HS fine, but I've had my experiences with Apple's fanboism on Reddit especially where a post of mine got taken down because I dared to post a video of how an iMac Pro in an Apple Shop was struggling to maximise a window on HS.
And this is mostly what I hate about, very few people dare to say "I don't have many problems, but I do admit HS has the most complaints to this day and ironically it was about performance and bug fixes, nothing major, Higher Sierra".
Because this is my experience, take out the fact that I have a personal, isolated problem with my mac, I follow these forums since Yosemite and this OS took the most ****.
To reiterate, High Sierra had been a disaster for me until 10.13.4, when it finally started to calm down. It's very alarming to me that it took 4 incremental updates to the OS before I finally started to see some stability, and really hope this isn't indicative of what's to come. Hopefully Mojave will be a much better experience since there seems to be no drastic changes to drive structure and display coding (I forgot the name of it) like there was with High Sierra, which I'm sure is what created so many issues. with that behind us and the new directive to focus on performance, I'm crossing my fingers that High Sierra will be just a bad memory by next year.
I've been through 4 or 5 OS upgrades, NEVER had issues like I did with High Sierra, just the occasional bugs here and there that were annoyances but hardly the show stopping "forced to reboot over and over" disaster High Sierra had been.
I've been through 4 or 5 OS upgrades, NEVER had issues like I did with High Sierra, just the occasional bugs here and there that were annoyances but hardly the show stopping "forced to reboot over and over" disaster High Sierra had been.
Well said. You're basically describing my experience, except I've had dozens of OS's since the 80s on various platforms and I have generally been pretty happy with most of them until Sierra. I don't like even Sierra that much, but at least it's stable. There's way too much lag in Safari and Finder amongst others.
Some are reporting a noticeably increase in speed in the very first beta of Mojave. Obviously, we can't be sure as to how consistent and stable it is yet, but I'm ready to upgrade the minute the public beta comes out and run it as my main OS. I did this with every OS since 10.7 until Sierra and it worked great except for the past couple of years. It will be a few steps farther along in development and after I try out all of my apps in a quick fresh install on its own partition, I'll upgrade my system to it. I want Darkkkk Moddddeeee! lol. And the alleged performance improvements. Can't wait. I'm jealous of the devs right now. How pathetic am I?
I'm very excited about that as well. Not that I'm disappointed in High Sierra's or Sierra's performance, quite the contrary. But from what I've heard Apple's focus for their 2018 OS updates is on performance and reliability instead of introducing hundreds of new half-baked half-working features (come to think of it: wasn't High Sierra supposed to be the "improved" version of Sierra in the same way that Snow Leopard was the improved version of Leopard and Mountain Lion was the improved version of Lion? But I digress...). And it's about time they took a step back and focussed on what's really important. If only it weren't for the fact that apparently 10.14 won't boot off HFS+ drives anymore and will attempt force-convert even HDDs and FDs to APFS I might even be tempted to install the 10.14.0 final release on my daily driver. However, I'm not particularly fond of APFS just yet and Apple has yet to release its full APFS documentation as promised. Before they do I am certainly not going to migrate my main production machine upon which mine and my family's livelihood depends to an undocumented brand-new and potentially still unfinished and faulty file system with that flashy Apple name.
At the end of the day 10.13.5 seems to be running pretty well by and large, and most of my issues except for the 10s freeze upon wake on my MacBook have been all but eliminated. I'm not seeing any issues performance-wise on neither iMac nor MacBook, and thus don't really see a necessity to update ASAP. As LincolnsiPod has said: it's alarming that it took four to five incremental updates to finally reach a level of stability, reliability, and performance akin to 10.12.6.