Apple is about to release their latest OS update. OS X 10.11, dubbed El Capitan, has been in developer hands since June, and went to public beta September 1st. So obviously today has seen a slew of panicked DJ companies saying not to update because stuff will be bent a little out of shape, if not entirely broken. If only they’d had some sort of notice… maybe an announcement months in advance, and a beta version being made available for companies to test.
Here’s my theory on what happens when a new OS is announced — instead of devoting some resource to the important task of installing and running it under pressure for a few weeks with all current hardware, it seems more likely that a senior person immediately tasks a marketing type to draft a press release saying “don’t install it yet — it breaks stuff”, and that PR is ready weeks in advance. And once again, we appear to be in that same cycle, as my time line is littered with companies saying that El Capitan isn’t supported yet. Bugger.
Here’s the thing — not all of us have the luxury of a laptop for work and for play. We keep our lives in one usually expensive place, and by not having apps and drivers ready, we are deprived of having the cool stuff that OS updates delivers, especially when the advice we keep getting is to keep things up to date. I don’t do well with being told what to do, and especially struggle with being restricted in any way, so you can see why I’ve pulled out my soapbox.
My lemming credentials are well established, so I’ll just install it and then moan very loudly that everything should be working, something that I’m sure the industry depends on to get valuable feedback from users that they can then use to fix the issues. Are lemmings and guinea pigs related?
For me, there are no excuses, unless…
DEAR DJ INDUSTRY…
I ask a question because of my lack of in-depth knowledge about your internal processes. But given that you’ve all got developer accounts to test stuff out, why does it take weeks and sometimes months after GM release to make things work? Do you wait for the GM to drop and then throw resource at it? Do you feel that so much can change that it’s not worth doing anything before that point? Feel free to respond in the comments, or via email at the usual address if you wish to drop some knowledge on me to share anonymously. Please help us to understand.
So take this sarcasm-laden post as a warning. Check with the usual suspects before leaping in the update abyss. You’ve been warned.
Balsy, very true… and balsy. Awesome!
Many small companies have to do a tradeoff between assigning an engineer to write or finish a feature or do maintenance…
Many small companies have to do a tradeoff between assigning an engineer to write or finish a feature or do maintenance…
Well said Mark. This whole thing is embarrassing, especially for NI when they just dropped their latest update *two days ago*. Like really, you didn’t know this OS X update was this week as well?
was about to write it
What usually happens is they skip the betas because they are not feature complete. I.e. not final so all the beta testing in the world is not going to help and a complete waste of time if the final product changes and breaks something. Numerous times have I seen software tested only for it to break when finally released because of in minor last minute fix.
I certainly don’t want the latest and greatest usually but since most Apple OSX /IOS updates usually just bog down my devices and encourage me to buy newer faster models. I think I will stick where I am with a Stable system until of course I am forced to change because something critical requires the update.
I will admit to having installed the latest Traktor version on Wednesday on release. I did that knowing that I could back out of it and the updates were in fact minor.
The big software companies keep pushing there ow. Agenda into making more revenue streams regardless of whether we want to keep up or not.
Usually within a month manufacturers have updated drivers out. It’s not like users NEED to update….
I like where you come from with these write ups and opinions.
Hey Mark… This is really a simple answer.
Companies aren’t going to spend money on allocating resources on a beta version of an OS. Changes to a beta can be made, and often are, up until the day its released to the public. It would be foolish to spend money on fixing what may have broke before even knowing what is actually broken in the final version.
Apple and Windows do what they want. Companies that rely on their computers need to follow suit. Its not a bus that is rode together.
I don’t see this changing until Apple creates their own DJ software that runs native on their own brand new OS.. even still bugs with a new OS are more than likely.
I digress… its NEVER a good idea to update to the latest version of an OS especially if you are using software that is made by a third party software company (which is most). This is an alert that will always stand true.
Thanks for this!
i would think that companies allocate more “resources” on putting tea and biscuits in the break room, than they do into testers. do you guys have anyone who is actually paid to test anything? who does it in a structured, critical, professional manner?
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you in theory-in part, yet think that what you are saying sounds a bit like passing the buck. If you hang out a shingle, as a “software company” then be that. be an expert at it. be “in the know” “ahead of the curve” and don’t take people’s money one day and then the next say “oh, uh..we don’t know what’s going on with the os that is crucial to our software” nobody is suggesting you have control of what ms or apple do, we’re suggesting that you know about what they do. that you are proactive and not reactive.
As I stated elsewhere, I’ve never seen anything in an OS X beta that was changed right before the beta ships. Things get fixed, not changed.
Serato does test early beta versions of an OS but official support can’t be announced until thorough testing is complete with the final released version (as there can and have been last minute changes that break things). If there are no issues, it’s usually pretty quick that support can be announced.
Like or lives will all of a sudden become meaningless without the latest OS update ? Apple has a habit of releaseing OS updates with bugs that aren’t even related to other software or hardware companies. There’s plenty of examples of OS updates that had to be fixed by Apple and took weeks to get fixed.
Blame Apple for not providing software companies with a final OS version before releasing it to the public. That way they can properly test with their software.
They do. Beta isn’t alpha. It’s beta. It’s the RC.
El Capitan has been in beta since June. All developers had access to it and even the first public beta was available to EVERYONE on July 9th.
Did you actually read what I wrote ? FINAL version. Not beta version. If I was a software developer, I wouldn’t rework my coding based on a beta version, knowing the alpha might have other changes that make all of my time and work useless. That would be like soundchecking a gig in club A on soundsystem A and then playing that gig in another venue on another system without even linechecking. The odds of that going well are pretty small.
What you’re describing is the exact reason why some developers get caught with their pants down. Beta are not some moving target that keep changing as it goes along. Typically betas ship feature complete to allow developers to test their code and for Apple to fix their bugs.
Nothing during the beta is going to make your code break more, if anything it’s the opposite, everything works better and better as the beta progresses.
I’ve been on OS X betas since Tiger and I’ve never seen stuff suddenly break before the gold master. If you have an issue with your code, you want to know as soon as possible and if Apple has an issue with theirs, you want to give them plenty of time to try and fix it. That’s just common sense.
What you’re describing is the exact reason why some developers get caught with their pants down. Beta are not some moving target that keep changing as it goes along. Typically betas ship feature complete to allow developers to test their code and for Apple to fix their bugs.
Nothing during the beta is going to make your code break more, if anything it’s the opposite, everything works better and better as the beta progresses.
I’ve been on OS X betas since Tiger and I’ve never seen stuff suddenly break before the gold master. If you have an issue with your code, you want to know as soon as possible and if Apple has an issue with theirs, you want to give them plenty of time to try and fix it. That’s just common sense.
Just stop whining and update your OS a week later or so!
Just stop whining and update your OS a week later or so!
i dont think anyone is concerned with situations like this, where one can wait a week or two. people are asking why do situations arise where there isn’t compatibility for much longer times.
in a computing world where the end user is more and more frequently having his arm twisted into updating, the dj software company that does the best job of staying current, will also do the best job of retaining clients.
it’s funny that you writing “whining” because i would suggest that is exactly what your own post is doing. Just look at the other story about dj player, there’s a great example of how much can be done on the software side if the devs just get to work and do it, as opposed to whatever happens at these bigger places. you don’t see anyone from dj player making excuses.
a better solution to this problem would be more direct access to the programmers; when a problem arises from an operating system change, have the programmers address it directly and demonstrate their knowledge of the issue in detail and give a realistic estimate of a fix or explain openly that a fix can’t be made.<—-THAT would be "not whining"
Just my opinion… Jobs rewrote the BSD Unix kernel into OSX and added core audio. Since his passing we no longer had the same linear mind writing the source code and mistakes in the source code are made. As new updates come out code gets written on top of code and prior mistakes get buried. I’m of the thought that these mistakes cause unforseen problems when the final release goes to the public. It’s why I haven’t bothered with OSX since mountain lion.
Steve Jobs did no such thing. He hired other people to do it then quite probably screwed them over their fair pay, because he was a nasty nasty man. A genius, but a nasty one.
I suspect the real issue things get broken is because a lot of audio interfaces aren’t class-compliant USB, so require their own drivers that break easily as soon as there’s a new version number in the code.
As I said, just an opinion. You have to admit though, since the loss of Jobs and Hubbard going back to the Unix community the OS has suffered. I was just drawing on the history that Apple bought NeXT and incorporated that source into OSX.
It’s easier to say Jobs. Most people can’t reference Hubbard, Torvald or the great Woz.
He did the Job needed for the Jobs he created although i couldn’t care less about any Job/Jobs he ever done.
Lefty nutjobs care that’s for sure! Now he’s Jobless, needless to say somebody else took over his Job.
How do you feel it has suffered? There’s been a steady flow of improvements, and it’s leaner than ever… it runs on hardware pushing 5 years old now. Every OS has its problems and bugs, but I haven’t seen anything show stopping from any of the OS developers.
How do you feel it has suffered? There’s been a steady flow of improvements, and it’s leaner than ever… it runs on hardware pushing 5 years old now. Every OS has its problems and bugs, but I haven’t seen anything show stopping from any of the OS developers.
Your ‘opinion’ makes no sense.
Steve Jobs was not a kernel hacker, barely a programmer and had also nothing to do with Core Audio which was introduced in 10.3, long after OS X split away from OS 9 and the NeXT purchase.
Sorry, it was a while ago. I thought the purchase of NeXT lead into Darwin, wasn’t core audio introduced at about the same point in time? There were a few us on the edge of our seat waiting at that point in time because of the announcement that Mac would release hardware on x86 architecture. iATKOS popped up soon after, but there where a few of us purchasing retail ISO, modifying them properly and installing the necessary kext. I remember how smooth those first few updates were, especially if you rewrote the EFI to include the kext.
Core Audio was released in 10.3 and the first x64 version of OS X was Tiger 10.4.4. Where are you getting your info from?
Sorry if I have this wrong, but didn’t the AIM PowerPC RISC processor have a 64 bit instruction set? We were installing RedHat and BSD on them when the Intel C2D first came out, it was a cost effective way to run Linux+ homework at the time and SAMBA is wicked fast. Wasn’t Darwin natively 64 bit and the kernel written for 64 bit X86 architecture introduced with 10.5? If 64 bit came in with 10.4.4, cool. You would know better than me.
I just remember being really excited with 10.5 due to Intel support. I really hadn’t been on one since the 90’s at that point (an old Centris, I think). I know Core Audio was introduced just before 10.5, but I wasn’t sure when and I was fairly sure that Darwin was introduced with X.
Intel support was 10.4.4.
My apology about asking questions earlier was preemptive, I figured that you’ve had to deal with this issue in the past.
I see people running OSX saying that it is a “driver” problem, this baffles me. Doesn’t Mac use Kernel Extensions (kext)? I didn’t think that Core Audio was like Steinbergs low latency drivers for windows, isn’t it native to the OS, generic and an unbuffered raw audio feed?
Also, if it’s not the “drivers” as most think it is, where does the problem usually occur? Software “hooks” into the OS, how the OS code modules mesh together, translation through the HAL, routing to the I/O…?
This all assuming that they are still using XNU and a modular based OS, as I said, it’s been a couple years since I’ve built a Mac.
Sorry if I’m asking a bunch of questions, a lot of Mac code contributors are obscured and not as transparent as either linux or unix as far as documentation on modifications released to the community. I don’t mind being wrong, it means I’m learning something. Any information is more than welcome.
I didn’t see you ask questions, maybe I missed that. I saw you stating things that weren’t true. I was simply correcting that :)
My impression from talking with people who develop for OSX is that lots of stuff breaks with every new version and Apple is not very helpful about telling devs what broke or why or how to work around it. So the developers have to go through a painful slog figuring out what changed and how much rewriting is necessary to fix it. Once there’s a fix, it has to go through QA, sanity-checking with older versions, etc. That all takes a lot of time.
Not accurate. Lion broke a bunch of audio related stuff, nothing like that in the recent upgrades.
The first El Capitan beta was back in June. That’s plenty of time to run stuff through its paces and find major issues. The only thing that could be a deal breaker if if you’ve fond an issue in Apple’s stuff and they don’t have time to fix it. Otherwise, no excuses.
basic rule of upgrading your computer’s OS: do it only once they announce the version that supersedes whichever you would upgrade to from your current one. it’s as simple as that. no windows or OSX feature justifies an immediate jump – it really doesn’t, don’t be fooled.
I went for w7 once they announced w8, and now that w10 is out, I’ve updated one of my machines to w8.1. do I have problems? not now, not ever. if you have the luxury or owning a throwaway computer that you use for e-mail and facebook (like any macbook – SCNR), by all means, update your OS.
but if you use it for anything production-related, just let the lemmings betatest it for you. because no OS is actually finalized by the time it gets released; it’s impossible. you don’t have to be a dev to know that – it’s common sense, which most people unfortunately lack because “ooh shiny”.