macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL(developer.apple.com) |
macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL(developer.apple.com) |
This is a report from the developer forums where people are supposed to report these bugs.
The second response in the thread is an Apple engineer acknowledging the bug, assigning a number, and asking the person to retest when new builds are available.
If you only read the comments here you'd come away with a completely different impression of what's happening.
Also, not having a regression test that catches OpenGL being completely broken on many common hardware configurations seems pretty bad. Yes, OpenGL on macOS is deprecated, but guess what, deprecating it was also stupid. It was a legal decision made by Apple lawyers pursuing a particular litigation strategy vs Nvidia that caused Apple's withdrawal from Khronos group. It wasn't a sound technical decision.
Both of these things make it seem like the lawyers are in charge at Apple rather than the engineers.
OpenGL is an even bigger deal so I don't see a world where it doesn't get fixed, but I also thought exactly the same way with the previous issue. It seems that Apple does not have any older video games in their testing apparatus.
Some references on the issue:
1. https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/issues/16499
2. https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/39540396560145-Ma...
That’s how release candidates work.
The headline could have included RC to make it accurate. As submitted it’s pretty misleading.
- A bug or regression is identified in a beta or release candidate. People quickly come to defend Apple saying it will surely get fixed.
- The bug or regression is released. People quickly come to defend Apple saying it's not a big deal, there are workarounds, and it will probably get fixed.
- The bug or regression is now the status quo. Why are you rehashing old news? Nobody cares, this impacts only 1% of people, you're imagining things, thread locked, user banned, et cetera.
The time to complain loudly and broadly is _before_ the bug or regression becomes the new status quo for the platform.
Especially on special internet forums, HN included, bots are generally paid for by professional influence campaigns so..
Yeah..
Whatever those AI's have to do to shape the conversation to get their message in, that's what they'll do. And that's going to sound pretty awkward to human ears.
You also make it sound like the Apple engineer assigned the number but the number was auto-assigned when the bug report was filed. The same number was present in the first post so it could not have been assigned by the Apple engineer.
As far as I can see the Apple engineer did nothing at all. The attitude of that Apple engineer is worse than staying silent on this bug.
The Apple engineer opened the ticket which is how these bugs get prioritized and fixed.
Staying silent or not responding would mean it doesn’t get fixed.
As a former Apple SWE that has read innumerable sysdiagnose reports, this statement is bullshit.
External bug reports very commonly have a variation of "THIS IS BROKEN YOU SUCK FIX THIS" as the main note. Even with a crash log attached that's not at all helpful. A sysdiagnose gives a state of the system the reporter has in front of them. You can't triage a bug with "FIX NOW" as the description.
I know I know, Apple has infinity dollars and every SWE should just magically fix bugs without needing to triage them first. Every external bug reports very is also a special snowflake that deserves concierge VIP serve and a dedicated SWE team to fix.
One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.
It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.
https://www.lunarg.com/the-state-of-vulkan-on-apple-oct-2026...
Now we need Mesa’s OpenGL-on-Vulkan to be production-ready when running on KosmicKrisp
I get the green triangle and `hasDrawable=1 status=0x8cd5 glError=0x0` which is the expected result.
Can't have OpenGL security issues without an OpenGL context
Oh how I rejoiced when 2 weeks later Apple released a changelog for a small quiet update stating that they had 'fixed' samba connections, even though they had never announced anywhere that they had broken them in the first place. The Macs started connecting to network drives again and all was well, and the mac users all went very quiet for a long while.
> As new builds become available, please retest and add the results to FB25133383. If you have access to the macOS 26.7.2 RC or the 27.2 beta, results from those builds belong there too.
Waste your donated time and effort testing against each new build, even though we won’t tell you if we even touched that subsystem between them.
If I were this bug reporter and got a response like that (after making a perfect report including a minimal reproducible test case) I would never donate another free bug report again.
...except the interesting tidbits shared like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142208
Until recently only Windows was the OS where I thought, "how could anyone use that voluntarily?", but Apple has managed to put their OSs right next to that in the same category. After a monotonous decline over more than a decade the final slump only took them three years. They've gotten better at failing faster than before.
I wholeheartedly recommend Linux. Seriously.
Now I must soundly say: Screw Apple.
Momentum and their hardware quality are the only things setting them apart from other platforms, while their ecosystem and individual software products are going to shit.
There's no way to have ourselves heard by them. Their "official" forums are just peer support for users to bang heads against each other.
Ironically, our best hope for computing now is that someone eventually uses AI to make a better OS and ecosystem, like they've started doing with the Adobe and Office clones.
Backward compatibility is less of an issue when fixing legacy stuff takes $25 in tokens.
It shouldn't be user's responsibility to have to get their binaries to work at all costs.
/s
On tvOS if a frame takes too long it just starts skipping frames and runs at 20 FPS. It won't recover after it happens. ThermalState is .nominal, so it's not that. There's also no way to just say "render as fast as possible" so you can measure performance, instead every device does throttling/pacing and it's completely opaque.
Anyway, I've had a developer account for 10+ years, and run into stuff like this constantly where you just can't get things to work properly. The framework isn't used much, so it's probably just broken.
I ported the game to SDL3/Zig and wouldn't you know it I can run continuously at 60 fps.. It's disappointing because I'm on board with targeting a single platform if I can utilize the hardware more effectively and make something special with it. But instead it's constantly an uphill battle of dealing with the opaqueness/brokenness of the platform. If I open a feedback request I'll probably just get told it's a bug, and maybe they fix it next WWDC.
The iPhone 18 Pro has been out exactly a month now and they still haven't pushed a fix for the popping/crackling speaker issue:
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/iphone-18-pro-speaker-c...
I still get crackling or popping many times a day.
Also, the annoying render stutters during scrolling across many apps haven't been fixed since iOS 26 was introduced (they were probably there before, but Liquid Glass made it worse). Even the iPhone 18 Pro suffers from it (also checked on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air).
Meanwhile, my underpowered P10P with GrapheneOS renders scrolling super smoothly.
(If you have a problem with this comment, please point out which part is untrue or unfair. iOS has copied many Android features in recent release, the Nexus 5 had an audio bug that was never fixed, and we are in a thread talking specifically about an iOS audio bug that seems to not be getting fixed. Please do not treat the downvote button like you're on Reddit.)
I have had other issues as well but something that actively locks my phone while I am obviously using it is an extremely frustrating start to my day.
I now get stuck in the camera app half the time I try to use it, and other nonsense.
IME on the lock screen I’ll be interacting with the media controls and the screen will just turn off, like I’m not doing any interaction.
It’s funny how that basic of functionality is broken.
Although so far I'm mostly happy with Apple products. Happier than with any Windows laptops.
(But damn if I encounter a bug or an issue. Just reporting those have made hordes of Apple fans attack me, in response to a standard technical bug report.)
iOS text input is also super buggy now, with frequent rendering glitches where the new blue words from "AI" suggestions or whatever overlap other text, there are stale blue squiggles which are hold-overs from grammatical issues which have since been fixed, completely nonsensical grammatically nonsense suggestions, etc.
The decrease in quality from 15 to 26 and then 26 to 27 is staggering.
Here’s another: Hide My Email’s “Forward To” feature is broken. You can’t change which email address messages get forwarded to. I have nearly 500 Hide My Email addresses and want to change the forwarding address, but can’t because the feature is broken.
The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.
We’re also apparently in a “Settings doesn’t search” build for the Mac once again.
This is not the first time OpenGL got broken and fixed later. This is why software testing exists.
I have my own share of criticisms for Apple, but if we treat every hiccup with doomerism, we will only miss the forest for a single, small bush.
local search is both broken on my mac as well as iPhone. I search for an app, and its app store entry OR settings pop up, not the app.
how does this persist? do they not use their own products anymore? have they simply given up?
agentcall( claude, data_thing, "please save this file to the user's home directory" )
I already see this behavior out of the tech support class that likes to participate in bureaucratic processes among gen z. The standards and expectations for what is colloquially "engineer", outside of bonafide engineering circles, has really fallen over the last two decades.
The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.
Over the past 8 years that has basically solved every bug all my colleagues ran into with MacOS. At some point my boss wasn't getting calendar notifications anymore for a couple weeks, "did you try and reboot?" fixed it in 5m. He later mentioned he hadn't rebooted in 7 weeks.
I don't understand why people treat Apple devices like unbreakable analog AM radios, they're very complex computers like any Windows or Linux machines, with a huge state machine beneath it that is easier to reset daily/weekly than to keep working properly for months.
And the whole premise of your comment doesn't make sense as it's based on a bug in a macOS version that hasn't even been released yet. Of course stuff will break when you're busy developing.
Do you have data on that? Based on peopel I talk to, it seems like there are plenty of people on both sides, and it's not clear to me which one is the majority.
My macbook has been kernel panicking during every sleep.
The reporter ALREADY provided a minimal example and Apple is like "yup we're going to keep changing things and you need to keep rerunning the code you sent us and reporting here because we won't bother to run your minimal example ourselves".
Just wow.
There's an engineer that's used to solely interacting with agents.
I work at a superscalar and we have also had about 40% increase in breaking bugs in prod year-to-year due to a lot of slop code. However, the engagement and revenue generated is up from the features. Why bother make a timeline and spend time and resources on things that the average user does not care about? Does the average person care about the OpenGL compatibility? No, so why would you spend effort on this instead of for example user engagement? Answer that.
Take that lesson back to your company as well. It is easier than ever to switch between clouds and AI providers. It’s easier than ever to replace any software in house. This isn’t an idle threat; I’ve already moved off of several software platforms this year for other providers, and I’m probably doing the same for millions of dollars worth of business every year in the future as well. And my company isn’t immune to it either - our biggest customers are always looking for options to bring software in house. The more we disrupt them with “small bugs”, the more likely they are to leave.
Parent is just passionate about the quality, or decline, of the tools he spend a good chunk of money of, and spends hours each day doing professional work with.
Try walking with a pebble in your shoe or sitting in a crooked chair or sleeping on a lumpy mattress and see how long before you get pissed, O Awakened Unattached Sage
Stop bending over for mediocrity.
The overall experience is good, aside from a few big areas: sleep mode still drains battery a ton, like 20-30% a day or more. And battery life in general while using it is pretty bad. And Firefox constantly runs out of memory and crashes.
Hopefully it improves soon. Even despite these issues I'm not going back to MacOS or Apple ecosystem again despite being a big fan of it and user for the last 7 years.
I would not use a laptop with those issues no matter the problems MacOS has currently.
The big concern for me is if I ever find myself in an emergency situation and I need to use my phone to contact someone. Apple's iPhone is so inconsistent and unreliable even in the best of conditions.
Edit: The modification date is actually earlier than the added date -- it looks like the file was transferred by Migration Assistant from my previous machine! Not sure if that's important.
I get that you can't generally expect things to be that stable. But in my experience they used to be and now they're not!
My M4 Max was probably that stable too until Tahoe, although I rarely left it running for more than a few weeks between updates.
No-one gives a shit if some subset of internet warriors thinks that you will have a downfall in 10 years because of some obscure esoteric corner cases that don't affect your mainline business. Even if they are right you will probably not be around the business at that time and will have made bank.
"Idk lol, it'll probably be fixed one day, keep testing and find out" is a pretty crappy response.
I migrated family email hosting from Google Workspace to Apple iCloud+ Custom Email Domains a few years ago and it's been smooth sailing. Few people realize that Apple has been a high-volume email host since long before Google Mail. This is the guide I used: https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
That's a false binary choice. You can also shift your purchases to other providers if you think a company is providing a shitty product.
As you see, seeking validation for your anger is not well received when your own culpability goes missing.
One would think that after this many macOS releases, all the techies would have learned to wait till the .1/.2 update drops with the critical bugfixes...
Is today the day you learn there is Apple astroturfing on this forum?
Similar story for Macs. It's hard not to see the graph for "macos broken" ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20... ) or "macos slow" ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=macos%20... ) or "how to fix macos" ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to... ) and find any reason for this other than people having a surge in bad experiences with Liquid Glass.
Of course, this is only Google Trends, and even if we interpret this as a 4x to 100x increase in bad experiences with Apple products with the forced introduction of Liquid Glass, it still might be the case that >50% of people aren't consciously experiencing problems from it.
If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.
I have the 128GB/8TB M4 Max and I'm not even coming close to using up all or even most of the unified memory. I suspect it may be related to some form of fragmentation, though I have no way to know how.
Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.
And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.
And that's just pure hardware. Hardware/battery performance dropping by OS updates has been well known, and there were a few class actions lawsuit Apple lost or settled and fined.
And yes, this is not the first time I’ve seen Apple requiring sysdiagnose for an excellently written report. Even John Siracusa would get these sysdiagnose requests; it’s a stalling tactic being applied indiscriminately.
If Apple cannot distinguish between an angry nontechnical user that SHOUTS IN UPPERCASE and a developer that communicates professionally with an equal, that’s Apple’s problem.
Apple's ecosystem depends on every middle-class person around the globe wanting to be able to signal that they have an Apple phone and use the same features as their social group. Engineers are a small subset, they barely move the needle.
All the bugs users are seeing are things developers picked up on earlier than users did, and shouted about in forums and bug reports. The fact Apple is not listening to its canaries down the coal mine is leading to the general slipping of its reputation.
Apples ecosystem replies on every middle class person around the globe having the frictionless experience Apple is known for. They erode that, and they slowly erode their customer base.
We’re also talking about MacOS, not iOS. Engineers make up a big segment of MacBook users. Apple is only 9.5% of the personal computing market.
Such as the ecosystem being united and not a fragmented mess even worse than Apple's lack of coordination between teams.
Such as first class support, drivers, and control programs, for almost all the hardware I want to own.
> Comparing traces, the render pass "OpenGL mode" sets an unknown bit in this kernel-processed block. If we set the same bit in our OpenGL driver, we find the clip space changes to -1/1.
Edit: I guess no, Angle is OpenGL ES. My bad.
The point of OpenGL was to have an API universally supported everywhere
The rumor is that Apple decided to put the engineering effort into the M7 series to make a bigger leap.
Engineering resources are finite. Expecting a company to release every version of every chip at every generation is not optimal. Some times it's better to put the development effort into a bigger goal that takes longer.
I wouldn't call that bad. They're being smart about development strategies instead of forcing everything into arbitrary release goals to satsify marketing and shareholders.
That's what I want from companies who development my products. This is a good thing.
Apple Silicon is a mirror into the Mac's decision paralysis. Apple wants to unify the Mac power users and iPhone casuals onto one silicon backbone, but can't decide who gets the short end of the stick. Tim Cook especially couldn't figure out how to ship a Mac Pro while retaining "ecosystem" level control over academic and prosumer customers. Professionals and researchers had a stack they wanted to use, and Apple didn't support it.
Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals, but he'll need to make software concessions to enter the true ARM HPC market. Ironically, that may entail Apple's rapprochement with Khronos to get the industry onboard with a CUDA stack alternative. Even a basic "inference hardware" GPGPU standard would put Apple Silicon back on the map for professional applications it has otherwise sat-out.
The Mac Studio is on par with the best gear out there for similar pricing. What kind of professional are we talking about here?
The person I responded to self-identified as an "Apple fanbitch". Now they categorically say "Screw Apple."
That seems like a pretty emotional attachment swinging from one extreme to another. Attachment will cause you pain.
And "Screw Apple" sounds like a totally valid consumer sentiment, when the products stop serving you and get more expensive and cocky. Not some blind rage.
And it's not a swing: it happens over years. Discontent built up by a thousand small cuts.
Things failing when you need them the most, so often that it makes you reflexively afraid the next time you think about trying it.
I don't think he intends to make a DGX Pod out of Macs, but the Studio is barely scalable. If we still had Mac Pro PCIe, then at least you could use that for interconnect. Thunderbolt RDMA is such a low pittance that Apple is basically only competing against novelty hardware like the DGX Spark.
Someone bought the hardware. It worked. Then it stopped / was damaged, and not for bad use (e.g. operating it in the sun or dropping it or something).
>but to suggest there's no such thing as price/durability trade offs, regular wear and tear, or just poor construction, and instead it is "hardware changes" is a weird take.
Nobody suggested that, so that's an even weirder take.
The things mentioned are not "regular wear and tear" nor price/durability trade offs.
As for "poor construction", yes, that leads to hardware that changes to worse under you over time. Mind blown?
Show me a single product EVER that doesn't have failure modes or that lasts forever.
None of this is to say I excuse poorly made products. But they generally are known before most people buy them, so a buyer can make an informed decision.
Again with the bullshit strawman. Did anybody said anything about "zero defects under any circumstances"?
Yes, production units can fail. Errors can be made in some factory. Or from some supplier.
Not the same as designing a crappy keyboard mechanism, people have called out as crap for years, insisting on it, and it failing people again and again - only to come with fanfare 5 years later to revert it as if you're innovating by doing so.
Or like making parts non replaceable on purpose and having them get worse performance in newer versions of the OS for no good reason. (The complimentary thing to tieing OS features to newer versions of the hardware for no reason, even when support for them in hardware form is absolutely not necessary).
>Show me a single product EVER that doesn't have failure modes or that lasts forever.
Conversation is over.
The conversation on HN has expanded way beyond that, used as a mere starting point, and in this subthread is about the "death by a 1000 cuts" of modern Apple issues.