My final post on the original topic: long startup. Turns out my Samsung T5 SSD died but rose from the dead: while 1.2 TB of data disappeared because the encrypted APFS volume refused to mount, it did reformat without a problem and an extensive R/W test shows that all is well with the hardware it seems. So I don’t know whom to blame for this: Samsung or Apple’s APFS, or the combo.
What does this have to do with the original thread you’re asking? After resurrecting the SSD, whether I formatted as HFS+ +/- encryption, or APFS +/-encryption, Xojo startup with a full set of MBS plugins completes in <30 sec.
So I am at a loss to explain the previous slowdown. The only diff is before, the SSD was formatted as APFS+encr under high Sierra, vs now I moved to Mojave. So it wasn’t the encryption, or HFS vs APFS.
I am still left wondering whether APFS is what pooched the SSD in the first place…Has anyone had issues with APFS? I am reluctant now to use anything but HFS.
The last I heard about APFS, is that it’s not recommend for use on external drives, spinning drives (like “Fusion” drives), something to do with it’s design is for soldered on chips of certain capacities, as opposed to being for all drives like HFS+ is/was.
I don’t think the recent OS updates give you a choice in the matter for the boot drive, whereby if it’s not APFS, they auto convert it to APFS. Many people attribute the recent OS slowdowns to APFS as well.
I’ve taken the guess-work out of my configurations under Mojave and Catalina -
I accept the system drive as APFS, but then I create my home folder and other folders like /usr/local and /opt as symlinks to a mounted 48TB HFS+ RAID array. I also tried moving /Library, but it wouldn’t let me delete the original folder or create the symlink without disabling scp.
I notice that starting up Xojo on my 16" macbook pro i9 running Catalina is 40% slower than starting up the same Xojo version on my 15" macbook pro i9 runing Mojave. How I wish I could run Mojave on my 16" macbook pro. Had I known how truly awful Catalina is in terms of speed and flexibility, I would never have ordered the 16" MP.
I use 18 plugins and need most of them for my projects. But as noted above, no big issues on my other computers.
Agreed, but so is the overall satisfaction. Others (including myself) have experienced the poor performance on the 16" MacBook Pro, which made it an incredibly disappointing experience, finally they’ve fixed the thermals, but then cripple the machine with bad performing, buggy software.
There are some scary decisions being made at Apple at the moment. My Catalina machine was connecting to Apple every two hours when it was supposed to be asleep, it was draining the battery 50% overnight. I fixed it by disabling a whole bunch of settings, now the machine will last 14 days asleep, instead of 1.5.
Not only is my 16" i9 Macbook Pro significantly slower than my previous 15" i9 Macbook Pro, it is less flexible because Catalina is still a disaster. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have bought it. Poorly engineered in terms of thermal management, poor video performance and the required use of a terrible OSX. Enough to drive me back to Windows.
There are also some scary decisions being made by Xojo. Each version of Xojo is slower than the previous version in terms of startup and the 64bit apps keep getting slower and slower. The last decent Xojo release is 2017R3.
I had access to a new 16" MBP for 5 days. My 2013 rMBP i7 was faster both in seat of the pants feel and benchmark tests for just about everything that I do.
This way off the original question, but I’d just like to add I think under consumer laws you may be entitled to your money back.
Apple promote this machine with better cooling over it’s previous machines, and the thermal limitations of the previous generation are well documented. You purchased this machine under the guise that it would be faster than the previous machine you had (which suffers from the thermal issues). If it wasn’t for the incorrect marketing, you would not have purchased this machine. Now that you have this machine, and with video you can prove that it is not any faster, but slower in some cases, this is grounds for either misleading marketing or that the product is not fit for it’s intended purpose. Sure it’s hassle to attempt this, but if you can get your money back and return this machine, you’ll feel better.
There’s a Polish guy who discovered that under European law, if a product breaks down more than once in two years, you as the customer are entitled to your money back. He had to fight, but eventually got his money back, after his machine needed yet another keyboard replacement.
At this point, I don’t see much other choice, we as customers have filed bug reports, dealt with Apple’s support, contacted the CEO with politely worded letters expressing concerns over the decline in quality, and nothing changes, if anything Apple have gotten seriously worse in the last two years. Returning the products is the only thing left we can do.
Our intention is not to drive Apple under, it’s to get Apple to wake up and correct these mistakes which are hurting it’s customers and brand, before it’s too late. We do these because we want Apple to exist in the next 5~10 years, not to be relegated to the history books.
I understand your frustration Sam. However, we won’t be able to convince Apple to change anything with posts in the Xojo forum. In my opinion, in this forum we should focus on helping each other and driving Xojo forward.
But part of driving Xojo forward is having a decent platform. And we all agree that recent years have been close to disastrous regarding Apple quality, both hardware and software (more the latter in my opinion; my recent experience with AppleScript was a shocker, I cannot believe how barely usable this excellent mechanism is on Mojave, never mind the 2 days spent trying to just get any functionality out of it). So while not directly related to Xojo, Sam’s post is relevant as it may spur this community to draw a line in the sand with Apple, and maybe help slow or reverse the decline of Apple products that seem more and more focused on posting selfies on instagram.
Which is the height of stupidity IMO. I decide when my main machine gets updates and not Apple. For the test machine I always do the latest beta. But I had troubles on my iMac with a security update which failed.
I actually agree with what @Sascha S said, I’d become so distracted with my own whining that I’d forgotten why I was here.
@Peter Stys What it is that you’re trying to do with Apple Script? Maybe between us, we can figure out an alternative way of accomplishing the task, that might have less problems.
Which is the height of stupidity IMO. I decide when my main machine gets updates and not Apple.[/quote]
And the Security Update 2020-003 for Mojave even thwarts/undoes the ability to ignore Catalina nags using the previous simple single terminal command. And while the thread has workarounds for now, it is staring to feel like a cat and mouse game.
I had a 15" 2012 MBP which I sold after getting a 13" 2018 MBP which still runs Mojave. And while I normally use with an external monitor in my office while not traveling, I decided a 13" is just not enough screen real estate when traveling. So would consider a 16" with nicer keyboard, especially when the mini-LED is available. But wish you could reload them with Mojave or earlier.
[quote=490519:@Sam Rowlands]@Peter Stys What it is that you’re trying to do with Apple Script? Maybe between us, we can figure out an alternative way of accomplishing the task, that might have less problems.
If it’s confidential, I’m happy to sign a NDA.[/quote]
As an academic, nothing I do is confidential
See recent thread of mine on the topic (Applescript in the subject line).
