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

[chrono1081]

You did write “Computers have all kinds of tests they run before the operating system boots to restart and refresh everything that makes them run”.

That sentence is patently inaccurate as to the effect “tests before the operating system boots” actually have.

Now you’re referring to “checks and resets the software itself does”. What does this mean? Are you talking about the OS as “the software”, or a user app as “the software”. Kindly provide references.

Back to the topic of this thread, please appreciate that when you have to restart the phone operating system to fix a user mode app, then a failure / program state error has been encountered at the OS or system service layer.

I literally deal with these as a full stack backend developer and systems developer - I just fixed a Java JRE induced bug and a Microsoft kernel induced bug in the last couple of weeks. That’s why the OS kernel architecture is so important. QNX is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of stability - this is why it’s used in automotive, health care and NASA.

You do sacrifice a small amount of performance due to message passing in micro kernels, but Apple’s excellent SOCs designs would minimize this a great deal.

Overall, the OP is not wrong. Apple could and should do better at the system level; but it would require a lot of investment and Apple just doesn’t have the resources to do it right /S

I'm not wasting my day trying to explain to you how computers work. I've worked in IT for over a decade as well as software development for over a decade. Nothing I said was incorrect. If you're so knowledgeable about this, please tell Microsoft and Apple as well as every single hardware/software manufacturer out there how to solve this problem, I'm sure they'll be all ears.

 

[raythompsontn]

I've worked in IT for over a decade as well as software development for over a decade.

I have worked in IT for over 50 years starting way back back with machines with physical transistors. I have coded operating systems, compilers, database systems, huge financial systems, ATM and POS systems. Nothing has changed in all that time regarding reboots, restarts, resets, whatever term that someone wants to use. Even the most carefully planned, coded and tested system will encounter issues. Sometimes stuff happens. Corrupted memory, rogue pointers and buffers, something never anticipated or failure to hold the mouth properly. Stuff happens.

 

[GGJstudios]

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.

I think you're confusing a marketing slogan with a guarantee of performance. In many cases, Apple products may "just work" in comparison to competitors, but it's not a warranty, guarantee or even a promise that all Apple products will never have flaws or problems. It's taken much more time to write and respond to this thread than it would have taken to restart your device multiple times. You're certainly entitled to have and express your opinion, but it sounds like some unrealistic expectations are the primary source of frustration.

 

[jonblatho]

Please point me to the marketing materials using that phrase.

Does a WWDC 2011 keynote slide count?

 

[Wizec]

I'm not wasting my day trying to explain to you how computers work. I've worked in IT for over a decade as well as software development for over a decade. Nothing I said was incorrect. If you're so knowledgeable about this, please tell Microsoft and Apple as well as every single hardware/software manufacturer out there how to solve this problem, I'm sure they'll be all ears.

A decade? Get real.

I’ve worked in this field for over 30 years. Everything you have said was basically technobabble. I’ve refuted your quotes point by point and you haven’t shown me once where I was incorrect.

Quoting you once again for emphasis:

“Computers have all kinds of tests they run before the operating system boots to restart and refresh everything that makes them run”

You simply don’t know what you’re talking about ^^

No one is arguing that bugs don’t or won’t happen. For 13yr of my career I have done software maintenance (fixing bugs that others have written). That still has little to do with the OP position that we shouldn’t have to restart Apple devices so often.

“The operating system is microkernel-based, and its key attributes of stability and security, is useful in mission critical applications such as medical equipment, air traffic control and control systems.”

A Look At BlackBerry's QNX Business

Despite the strong proliferation and installed base, the QNX business is not believed to be very meaningful to BlackBerry’s financial performance (the company does not break out QNX financials). The business generates revenues through the licensing of QNX software products and through the...

www.forbes.com

Correct OS and systems architecture actually make health checks and dynamic healing possible - without device restarts:

Here is yet another article, which takes the micro kernel and message passing architecture and applies it to higher level services:

Self-healing Architecture

In a very simple definition, microservice is a way to break monolithic service into loosely coupled services, which communicate with each…

everything-parijat.medium.com

I’ve given you links and clear explanations, you’ve made false claims about what I’ve said and avoided every specific point that I’ve put forward. My suggestion is to actually do the homework and stop with the word salads.

 

[GGJstudios]

Please point me to the marketing materials using that phrase.

 

[I7guy]

And people wonder why enterprise reliability rated software and equipment is so expensive.

You want Innovative features , Reliability, Low Cost.

Pick 2, in reality probably pick 1.

A corollary of you want it: fast, correct or under budget. Pick two out of three.

 

[Allyance]

Cold boot is a classic IT tool. Before wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what is the problem, cold boot.
I built and sold thousands of PC's in my own business for 20 years. Even my new iMac gets locked up once in a blue moon. Yank the power cord and get back to work. It if did constantly, then I would be worried. You won't catch me in a driverless car!

 

[saltcityman11]

but it helps in a way to fix the issue

 

[izzy0242mr]

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.

Didn't see if anyone else already posted this, but this is a really excellent short video explained by a Microsoft engineer about why computers have to reboot to fix issues:

 

[dysamoria]

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

Of course it's not an Apple-only thing. It's the whole damned tech industry and it's got to stop, not continue to be normalized.

 

[dysamoria]

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.

And then a restart again next time. And the next. And the next... and in every case, the user is losing time being forced to close & re-open apps and documents and switch their mental processes. They may seem like "insignificant" blocks of time, but it adds up, especially in the sense of causing frustration and obstructing workflow.

I once crusaded against the Microsoft/Intel platform of garbage for this exact issue: the small doses of wasted time that garbage products steal from us every day of our lives simply because they don't WANT to make their products better (better to them is Wall Street BS). For a brief time, Apple presented an alternative to that endless irritation, but they no longer do.

Also, you're incorrect: The easiest solution for the user is to NOT have to compensate for someone else's bad design in the first place. You're doing what people have been acculturated to do: put the responsibility on the user/customer, rather than the developer/provider of the tech/service. This is backwards.

There's never any accountability. The platform cultists will defend their own, rather than admit where it's broken, and tech people will just endlessly defend the whole tech industry's pathology with special pleading excuses ("you're not a developer, you can't understand", "you're doing it wrong")...

...just as people defend corporations for every other abuse of society they commit.

 

[I7guy]

And then a restart again next time. And the next. And the next... and in every case, the user is losing time being forced to close & re-open apps and documents and switch their mental processes. They may seem like "insignificant" blocks of time, but it adds up, especially in the sense of causing frustration and obstructing workflow.

I once crusaded against the Microsoft/Intel platform of garbage for this exact issue: the small doses of wasted time that garbage products steal from us every day of our lives simply because they don't WANT to make their products better (better to them is Wall Street BS). For a brief time, Apple presented an alternative to that endless irritation, but they no longer do.

Also, you're incorrect: The easiest solution for the user is to NOT have to compensate for someone else's bad design in the first place. You're doing what people have been acculturated to do: put the responsibility on the user/customer, rather than the developer/provider of the tech/service. This is backwards.

There's never any accountability. The platform cultists will defend their own, rather than admit where it's broken, and tech people will just endlessly defend the whole tech industry's pathology with special pleading excuses ("you're not a developer, you can't understand", "you're doing it wrong")...

...just as people defend corporations for every other abuse of society they commit.

In a perfect world you’re correct. But this isn’t a perfect world and we have to live within its’ constraints. Or else make your own perfect world.

 

[Camarillo Brillo]

And then a restart again next time. And the next. And the next... and in every case, the user is losing time being forced to close & re-open apps and documents and switch their mental processes. They may seem like "insignificant" blocks of time, but it adds up, especially in the sense of causing frustration and obstructing workflow.

I once crusaded against the Microsoft/Intel platform of garbage for this exact issue: the small doses of wasted time that garbage products steal from us every day of our lives simply because they don't WANT to make their products better (better to them is Wall Street BS). For a brief time, Apple presented an alternative to that endless irritation, but they no longer do.

Also, you're incorrect: The easiest solution for the user is to NOT have to compensate for someone else's bad design in the first place. You're doing what people have been acculturated to do: put the responsibility on the user/customer, rather than the developer/provider of the tech/service. This is backwards.

There's never any accountability. The platform cultists will defend their own, rather than admit where it's broken, and tech people will just endlessly defend the whole tech industry's pathology with special pleading excuses ("you're not a developer, you can't understand", "you're doing it wrong")...

...just as people defend corporations for every other abuse of society they commit.

Ok, but I rarely have to restart any of my apple devices

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

And then a restart again next time. And the next. And the next... and in every case, the user is losing time being forced to close & re-open apps and documents and switch their mental processes. They may seem like "insignificant" blocks of time, but it adds up, especially in the sense of causing frustration and obstructing workflow.

I once crusaded against the Microsoft/Intel platform of garbage for this exact issue: the small doses of wasted time that garbage products steal from us every day of our lives simply because they don't WANT to make their products better (better to them is Wall Street BS). For a brief time, Apple presented an alternative to that endless irritation, but they no longer do.

Also, you're incorrect: The easiest solution for the user is to NOT have to compensate for someone else's bad design in the first place. You're doing what people have been acculturated to do: put the responsibility on the user/customer, rather than the developer/provider of the tech/service. This is backwards.

There's never any accountability. The platform cultists will defend their own, rather than admit where it's broken, and tech people will just endlessly defend the whole tech industry's pathology with special pleading excuses ("you're not a developer, you can't understand", "you're doing it wrong")...

...just as people defend corporations for every other abuse of society they commit.

Yes it is a conspiracy. To get rid of all those garbage companies you can always write and design your own OS and the myriads of apps that have to run on it. Then you fully own, control, comprehend and understand your own restarts.

 

[Gudi]

You want Innovative features, Reliability, Low Cost.
Pick 2, in reality probably pick 1.

I pick all three and call it: the M1 iMac second-hand market. 🖥️

 

[Ruggy]

You're drawing attention to threads where people have problems but I honestly think for most people it's a pretty rare occurrence to have to do this with Apple. I rarely have a lock up that requires rebooting and that's been true for multiple machines over 15 years with Apple.
Yes, people that do have a problem go on forums but what about the literally millions of users who just use their machines without a problem every day and don't even have a lot of knowledge about them?
Furthermore, when you get into a lot of the complaints you'll see here you'll find that people are running beta software.

 

[mcled53]

Not the exact phrase, but same message:

macOS - Continuity

Do more using Mac with other Apple devices. Make calls and send texts, use iPhone as a webcam, hand off files, and automatically unlock your Mac.

www.apple.com

wrong try again.

 

[mcled53]

I'm not wasting my day trying to explain to you how computers work. I've worked in IT for over a decade as well as software development for over a decade. Nothing I said was incorrect. If you're so knowledgeable about this, please tell Microsoft and Apple as well as every single hardware/software manufacturer out there how to solve this problem, I'm sure they'll be all ears.

I think in most cases there is an obscure kill command on an obscure daemon but it's easier to say reboot. Let's there are cases of lazy support staff.

 

[samadulator]

I think what a lot of people are missing is that sometimes, a condition can exist inside the computer that can only be cleared or resolved efficiently by resetting the system's memory, which is where many critical operating system components live while they are running. Therefore, the only way to reset the memory is to unload the OS from the memory, which can only be done non-destructively with a restart command.

Think of it this way: shutting down or restarting gives the computer the opportunity to unload things cleanly to prevent the corruption of any stored data, which prevents further issues. Computing devices are not appliances... yet. Would I expect a toaster or a coffeemaker to work reliably all the time when they're powered? Yes—because in many cases the parts that make it work are purely electromechanical in nature. There's no spectrum of functionality—it's either "working" or "not working".

Computing devices have electronic circuit pathways enmeshed with the electromechanical pieces which is what gives them the ability to perform the complex tasks we require of them. Unfortunately, that complexity comes with a cost—the spectrum of different levels of functionality. For a computing device, this could mean anything from "working normally" to "running slowly" to "kernel exception" to "not turning on". These extended states are what create the troubleshooting step of "have you tried turning it off and back on again?". The two conditions in the middle are resolved by a restart.

In many cases, even restarting a wayward daemon will leave the system in a largely unstable state which would not occur with a full restart. In today's world where our devices have *very high* reliability and *very fast* boot times, the occasional restart is no longer the enormous loss of time—enough to go get a cup of coffee, let's say—that it once was in the 90s.

If a user is experiencing the need to restart frequently—more than once a day at a maximum—then that user should be looking at their workflow and what applications they are using on the computer. Remember that working with large files (hundreds of MB to over a GB in size) on a system with 8GB or less of memory in high-demand applications will result in the computer chopping up the files into chunks in order to process it... which creates overhead and increases the chances that memory corruption will occur. For general purpose computing on today's devices, restarting isn't even a thing—and many users with that workflow will not be able to remember the last time they restarted... a testament to how stable things have become for computing devices since the end of the 20th century.

 

[mcled53]

Boeing 737's need their computers rebooted about once a month otherwise some "short-bit" counter overflows or cycles to zero or some other funky mess.

 

[Shanghaichica]

That's a common way to fix most devices. They all get bugs and need a restart. They can't be on 24/7 all the time. Eventually they will need a reboot.

 

[dysamoria]

In a perfect world you’re correct. But this isn’t a perfect world and we have to live within its’ constraints. Or else make your own perfect world.

Nope. I’m not playing along with that whole “you want perfection” fallacy.

 

[romanof]

Way back in mainframe/minicomputer days, we watched with considerable amusement as "computers" were rebooted over and over again to the point where it became the normal first step in solving a problem. Unless some hardware failure happened, we almost never a hard restart (called an IPL in the lingo of those days) and it wasn't unusual for a machine to be up and running for a year with no power off. Reboot to fix is an artifact of "toy computers," not real ones. (Relax, I have four Macs and two Linux boxes and not a single mainframe in the house.)

Of course, part of the reason might have been the $million dollar price of one and the thousand dollar cost of the other.

Personally, I think the reason is because a certain company in Redmond unfortunately did not go out of business long ago.

 

[NT1440]

I think in most cases there is an obscure kill command on an obscure daemon but it's easier to say reboot. Let's there are cases of lazy support staff.

Is it “lazy” to correct the problem and get the employee back to work ASAP, or is it somehow better to walk an excel user through command prompts as they stare wall-eyed at you because they don’t understand what you mean by “right click”?

If you’re in a support role, many times your effectiveness is viewed (unfairly) as just number of ticket closures. Where is the incentive to explain how a computer works to someone who just uses a web browser and Office?

Lazy, pfft. Good support can accurately interpret a user’s technical ability and translates proper instructions to *their* level. When you get asked “You said reboot, but the menu says restart, should I choose that?” what exactly is the point in going on about daemons?