macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL
developer.apple.com218 points by Audiophilip 5 hours ago
218 points by Audiophilip 5 hours ago
15.8.2 isn't released.
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.
That's true, but I'm sorry, telling them to test it themselves every time a new release comes out because "I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship" is just stupid. It's a liability-reducing strategy benefiting only Apple, not a nice way to treat customers.
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.
TBH, I'm not saying "DTS Engineer" isn't an actual Apple engineer, but it feels very LLM-written. For something like that, I wouldn't want it to guarantee that a fix can or will be done in any sort of timeframe.
I hope it does get fixed, but Apple actually has a bad track-record with another deprecated API, AppleAL (OpenAL). They broke it in a very interesting way in Tahoe where mono-channel audio on Aarch64 (not through Rosetta) did not play and it was broken through all the betas. I believe it actually may still be broken today. The workarounds were either mono-to-faux-stereo channel duplication or switch to openal-soft.
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...
15.8.2 isn't released, but the 15.8.2 release candidate clearly is. I don't think think it's that crazy for people to be at least somewhat concerned that a fairly common important library got broken a bugfix release to a maintenance update that came out a month ago for a major version that came out two years ago without anyone internal testing it before publishing the RC.
> 15.8.2 isn't released, but the 15.8.2 release candidate clearly is
That’s how release candidates work.
The headline could have included RC to make it accurate. As submitted it’s pretty misleading.
The problem is that this is a well established pattern with this operating system:
- 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.
Thanks for the context, the state of HN has been quite sad in recent years, now people (hopefully, and not bots) read the title and then go on random anecdotes, dumb generalisations and awkward tangents.
>and awkward tangents
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.
An Apple engineer acknowledged the bug? That comment reeks strongly of Claude. I have a feeling that somebody did not use their brain and the response is an auto-response by Claude. Also things like attaching a sysdiagnose is useless and is well known to be hoops Apple requires bug reporters to jump through with no benefit to either party.
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 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.
The Apple engineer didn’t open the ticket. The original reporter did. Perhaps actually look at the assigned number before jumping to defend Apple.
A user feedback is different to an actual radar that will be fixed by a dev.
However since they didn't post a radar ID, nor did they mention filing a radar, this is all pure speculation
> Also things like attaching a sysdiagnose is useless and is well known to be hoops Apple requires bug reporters to jump through with no benefit to either party.
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.
Did you read the bug report? This is not your garden variety THIS IS BROKEN YOU SUCK FIX THIS bug. It is respectful, it has a minimal reproducer, and it is communicated clearly. There’s no reason to stall it using the sysdiagnose requirement.
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.
Especially since sysdiagnose contain so much info, it’s bad opsec to give that info over. Unless you repro in a fresh VM maybe.
Because you're testing pre-release software on a dedicated machine... right?
The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating. We are in the thousand papercut stage where lots of small things just don’t work properly.
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.
I've been playing around with RealityKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit) lately, it's their SceneKit replacement (they deprecated it this year).
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 general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.
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.
My Nexus 5's "underwater" mic issue never got addressed. Wouldn't be surprised if the next thing iOS copies from Android is, "Audio bug that just never gets fixed."
(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.)
My Iphone has had some bugs in the last year that are so sloppy yet impactful its almost funny. About half the time im looking at my lock screen notifications, the screen will lock less than a second after touching the screen. I have had other issues as well, but for a company with so much money I expect a little more craftsmanship.
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.
Yeah iOS is headed the same way.
I now get stuck in the camera app half the time I try to use it, and other nonsense.
Same here.
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.
I really appreciate that I'm not the only one. Using Apple software is increasingly an experience in navigating a minefield of bizarre UX mistakes.
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.
The latest macOS, after a lot of praise, has proven to be really buggy to me. At least liquid glass only had poor readability, but now windows go missing/turn invisible almost daily and it’s getting seriously annoying.
It's so extremely buggy! I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release) because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe, but it has fixed no bugs which annoyed me with Tahoe and introduced so many new ones. Mission Control frequently switches to the wrong window (perfectly reproducible bugs which result in the wrong window coming forward). And in Mission Control, windows now overlap each other, are overlapped by the dock, and end up partially outside the screen, in ways they just never did in any earlier macOS release. The Launchpad replacement part of Spotlight in 26 was always super buggy but has gotten even more buggy in 27. Just yesterday the WiFi menu in the menu bar beach balled.
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.
> I upgraded to Golden Gate early (tho after release)
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...
> because everyone (including here) said it's so much better than Tahoe
Is today the day you learn there is Apple astroturfing on this forum?
You'd think there is no point in astroturfing the latest macos. They make no money from you or me upgrading their OS software. If anything it is a net negative for apple's brand to have me upgrade and face the B.S. newer OSs saddle upon you. The turfing would do better to keep me on my current OS if the goal is to increase my pleasurable feelings towards the apple brand.
Entangling the whole system with the tentacles of an AI squid does not quite equate to "making no money from you or me".
Actually it feels a lot like Apple before NeXT's acquisition.
That sounds right.
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.)
Youngsters have to understand that Apple's quality was so bad, not only did they fail to deliver in a few products with industry partners, the teams weren't even capable of writing a new operating system.
Windows is also equally away from "3x Developers!" cry days.
Copeland... (That was the actual name of supposed future Apple's OS 30 years ago, sounds kinda different with 2026 perspective.)
I remember that period. System 7,8,8.6 were all so fragile compared to Windows. No progressive crashes... just sudden lockups.
And endless beach ball of death, where the mouse would still move the ball, but nothing else would be happening.
Very true. People that manage to be nostalgic about system 8 or 9 mystify me.
Or Windows 7 for that matter.
Windows 7 was the best OS ever made. I had one installation running without any slowdowns or rot for more than 9 years.
Audio problems aren't new. I remember that the last 10.9 build I was still using in 2016 had this bug where sound would just stop working every now and then. `sudo pkill coreaudiod` fixed it every time.
I'll need to try that! I have that issue like once a month on the macbook my work gave me, and rebooting was the only thing I figured out that works.
My personal favorite is the alarm clock on iOS, after the first time you dismiss the alert with the phone unlocked, it reappears as a transparent dialog 10% of the size of a normal one (i.e. so small not even a stylus could click the buttons). The mashed ball of widgets can only be swiped off the screen.
My macOS 27 m4 MacBook 128GB ram has in the last 3 days: completely locked up and went black screen (after reboot it had a stacktrace that windowserver crashed and didn’t come back) ; had a full on kernel panic, which later an AI agent analyzing the panic dump said it’s because the iOS simulator was somehow leaking resources and watchdog triggered a the kernel panic.
Yup I have the same problem with audio. And I found more problems last two years than in previous 10. I wonder if that due to some internal cuts in quality assurance or moving to AI and vibe coding more code than devs can review. But it may be subjective feeling.
My iPhone 15 has a weird one. I beta tested the glass updates. Part way through the beta it broke, and my phone will only show glass visuals during movement. Once it stops it turns opaque. This happens across the entire phone. Resetting the phone from a backup doesn’t fix the issue. My only fix is to wipe my data and start over. Hardly a solution. I’m no longer on the beta, even a few major versions updated now. Issue remains.
I would agree with you if this wasn't a release candidate. I would wait and see at this point.
This bug is one of many papercuts in Apple software.
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.
Wait, this is terrible news. I was planning to migrate off of Gmail using that feature
It does work great generally. Here's what changing your foward-to looks like: https://imgur.com/a/feSBCCN
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...
The window manager bugs have been present since the first macOS 27 beta, and have made it unchanged to the current stable release.
As if this is the only example in support of what the parent said? Or as if these are restricted to release candidates and beta versions?
I for one stopped holding my breath after witnessing a pretty major issue introduced in a macOS beta carry into the stable release for the dozenth time.
On the latest production release for Intel Macs, I can no longer connect to two external displays at the same time. I have to plug them in one at a time (sometimes multiple times before they register), and reconnect them after sleep. A very annoying regression.
The hidden "Detect Displays" button in Display settings does nothing.
I genuinely have more issue with my audio peripherals (USB microphone, bluetooth earbuds) on the M4 Macbook that my work gave me than on my Arch Linux desktop. Around once a month the Macbook will inexplicably not be able to receive input from mic or output to my earbuds (or both!) despite the OS settings still showing the current input/output as selected correctly. Rebooting somehow fixes it, but I'm at a loss to understand how the computer/OS that costs thousands of dollars and is supposed to "just work" because of being completely designed by a single entity manages to struggle with this when the completely arbitrarily selected set of hardware and software components that I threw together for my desktop seem to never have any problem like this nowadays.
The Font Book on macOS 27 seems broken - user fonts never show up.
We’re also apparently in a “Settings doesn’t search” build for the Mac once again.
> The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating.
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.
Did they actually catch it in their own tests? Or is this an external developer catching it for them? I guess if it works, it works, but this certainly seems like something they could be testing for up front.
I remember seeing it as an entry in Known Issues list of one or two beta releases. The final releases didn't have the problem.
you really have to wonder how they managed to mess up this bad, and why they're doing nothing about it.
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?
Finder search has been broken for me for years I think, and that smart folder "Recents" never worked properly. It's puzzling how they can let this happen.
Mine has been doing that for a fair few months actually. Sometimes flipping the output to something different then back again sorts it, other times a reboot is required.
This is a personal anecdote - I'm a games developer, working predominantly on Windows. Since last year I have to use a Mac to work with our iOS builds and I honestly don't understand people saying Mac is for developers - the number of actual outright bugs I run into every week makes windows look like something that came out of NASA. I eagerly awaited the release of MacOS 27 to maybe finally address some of them, and of course it just traded one set of problems for another. It's just shockingly bad - and unlike a true Linux system you have very little ability to fix some of those issues yourself too.
The people that say that usually equate UNIX with developers, because naturally on other platforms the software materialises out of nothing.
Yes. The top menu access for apps full screened in Tahoe stop working. WTF.
The general quality decline in software seems to be accelerating. I suspect it’s mainly due to AI slop. Engineers creating tons of code due to management pressure and lesser people available to test.
SwiftUI and probably Liquid Glass preceded slop. It's a larger cultural/management issue within Apple.
Honestly it aligns with ideas like the move to Swift. (And the monstrosity of Xcode replacing project builder).
Back when it was obj-c with cocoa the quality was night and day higher than it is today. Not too long ago I booted my G4 and was stunned by how responsive it is, which was extra surprising considering at the time it didn’t feel that way!
You can tell that generations of greybeards at infinite loop have been retiring. They got the hardware culture right only to see the nextstep legacy in software go to waste.
On mine, audio starts to crackle when memory pressure is too high. lol
I get about a second of audio interruptions when theme auto-switches from light to dark at night. Usually no big deal but I need to remember to turn it off if I were to perform with it.
My Mac has developed the issue of slowing down over time if not rebooted. Heavy GPU use accelerates the decay. It feels just like swapping to disk except it's not - swap usage always 0. I didn't have this issue before Tahoe.
We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing
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.
This isn't happening for me, if by "over time" you mean "several weeks" of heavy GPU use without a reboot. Consider the possibility that the root cause is not macOS.
By "over time" I mean that if I run local LLMs or play graphics-intensive games (like No Man's Sky's native Mac port) I can start seeing up to half-second (or longer) delays in switching apps, starting videos and much more with less than 5 days of uptime. Heavy enough usage will reproduce it within a few hours.
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.
I believe you, just suggesting that the issue may not be quite as general. I have a 64GB Studio M1 Max, so the years of hardware/firmware differences between us may be relevant as well. Hope you find a solution!
It didn't happen to me before the update, so I suspect it must be something about the update or how it interacts with the software on my system. Still, it's one of those issues I have no hope of seeing solved, because at this rate nobody doing development at Apple is actually going to leave a Mac running for days on end...
I once worked in L1 support, and because we had to take calls @07:00 sharp (we were the only number a company of 40k people could call) and Windows updates were still a multi-hour endeavor, I stuck to rebooting daily (or shutdown+startup) all devices I use heavily, including MacOS.
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.
My Intel Mac didn't need to be rebooted. I would leave it running for months with no issues. Apple devices genuinely used to be that stable.
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.
I was seeing a bug that was very similar to what you describe! I fixed it on my Mac by deleting the .CFUserTextEncoding file in my home directory.
Huh, that file seems to have existed since I first set up the machine! Do you have any more information on this? For me it just contains the bytes `0x0:0x0`. How'd you know to try that and do you know how it worked at all?
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.
Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues. I think overall the Apple ecosystem is really good in terms of software quality. However, there are of course issues like with any system and if Apple is not able to reproduce something, the harder it gets to get it fixed.
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.
> Meanwhile, most of us don't have any issues.
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.
The only data most of us can refer to are Google Trends. The unprecedented peaks for "How to switch to Android", "iPhone revert update", "iPhone fix battery", "iPhone slow", "new iOS sucks", "iPhone bad now", "How to block iPhone updates" all reached new peaks with the release of Liquid Glass in late 2025.
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.
Wow those are some pretty crazy graphs. Is Apple customer satisfaction tanking that hard?
Regularly bugs reported during a beta do not get fixed until the next major release. If they do not, they will be closes as wontfix because they were fine to exist a whole major version.
My macbook has been kernel panicking during every sleep.
Been using macOS since the OS X days of Panther (2003). Since then, people were kicking and screaming about bugs that Apple presumably didn't fix yet, and that's probably true. But it does get fixed, and if you're just sensible - like not upgrading immediately, you'll hardly notice issues. On average, I'm about 6-12 months behind on major versions. I'm in 26.6.2 (Tahoe) right now
I "upgraded" from Tahoe pretty quickly because Tahoe, even a year on, was such a buggy mess that I hoped Golden Gate would be better, especially after it was glazed as a bug fix release. But it just introduced new bugs without fixing the old ones. Staying 6-12 moths behind doesn't leave you with a functional system anymore, it's just differently broken.
Sad but not surprising. Apple marked their OpenGL subsystem as deprecated all the way back in 2018 with macOS 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12. By some miracle it has kept working all that time. While I hate it that Apple can just up and declare a widely used cross-platform API 'deprecated,' it's their system, not ours. So, we should not expect them to care or lift a finger if they accidentally break it.
When they break stuff, developers should lift their middle finger in response. That they don’t I think reflects some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.
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.
> 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.
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's work is cut out for them; M7 and M8 desperately need a better GPU. These SOCs put up fantastically efficient single-core performance, but have some of the worst GPU compute efficiency you can buy. It also needs a better interconnect than RDMA, since Thunderbolt is snail-speed when networking several iGPUs together.
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.
> Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals
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 professionals who use multiple gpus or outboard gear etc. Professionals used to love filling up the old Apple towers. Im guessing a MacOS workstation with several PCIE SSD cards and several GPU cards would be a welcome system for say somebody working on VFX on Marvel movie, and need to keep rendering things in the background without slowing down their workflow.
Professionals that see "rackmount" and don't stop at a one-unit rack. Industry-scale customers, not prosumer.
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.
And do what? They make money selling products to apple users. They probably already sell to PC if they are interested in it. Not so much stockholm syndrome, but some sort of modern sharecropper development system for sure.
As long as people keep buying them, devs have no choice but to adapt
Devs always have a choice, but almost always choose to make more money. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head forcing them to develop for macOS.
It’s not really “some miracle” as they clearly had some incentive for it to work - it just runs through Metal on the ARM series now. Someone had to spend the time to get that together.
Selling overpriced decides to billions of people and somehow still nobody is available at Apple to spend time on this. No promotions for quality I guess.
It's more nuanced and the official deprecation status doesn't mean much. sandbox-exec has been deprecated since 2016, but obviously Apple can't afford to break it (Chrome and basically all sandboxing solutions rely on it).
In practice the best way to get an OpenGL-ish API is WebGL2. I don’t think Apple would dare to break that.
Yes, this is the real continuation of that. I still don't agree with the deprecation, and hope the support will be continued.
Seems like a good time to mention that LunarG’s Vulkan-on-Metal wrapper reached Vulkan 1.4 conformance recently.
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 can't imagine what the nested layers of emulation would do to performance. Lol
I think it has the potential to be pretty good, especially on modern hardware. If using DXVK or VKD3D is any indication, I think the performance losses can be minimized. Plus, I've used Zink before on Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver, and it's pretty good.
The hits would come from format transformations. When the math gets to the metal, there is little difference.
Right I'm still on 15.5. But random app windows flicker! FLICKER! And it's a brand new 2025 M4 MacBook Air. This is the kind of thing I would expect from like Linux in say 1998?
Slack flickers a lot for me, no idea why. I haven't updated macOS yet because I don't love the look of the new liquid glass stuff. I think this makes me 2 majors behind now...
Was it released for the M4? If so, you might have a hardware problem. Bad display cable, faults on the motherboard, that kind of thing?
No, it's specifically just certain app windows. If it was a hardware failure, we would expect the whole physical display to flicker.
A remote possibility: macOS can switch between different graphic modes, depending on the application, utilizing different hardware and power profiles. At least, it does so on my laptop, and old one with two different graphics "cards", but I don't know if that's your case.
WTH. 15.8.1 is current, 15.8.2 ought to be security fixes only.
Maybe they asked Claude to fix a vulnerability?
Can't have OpenGL security issues without an OpenGL context
OpenGL is a low(ish) level hardware interface, that is almost certainly implemented in legacy unsafe code, so it will be fertile ground for CVEs. Presumably this is a security fix gone wrong
Um, but 15.8.2 isn't released yet. Why is this such a crisis? It's normal to break stuff before you release.
There's a few very annoying audio and Bluetooth bugs on MacOS. I've even installed 3rd party software to hack a fix one of them.
That’s why I bought a Bluetooth Dongle, where everything related to Bluetooth is handeld on the Dongle itself and the PC/Mac only “sees” a USB soundcard (Creative BT-W3X)… it made all my (audio) related Bluetooth bugs disappear on macOS (also on Windows and Linux).
what, there are still regression in the age of AI? or OpenGL is never in regression test suite to begin with?
Tell me this is sarcasm because it's genuinely impossible to tell these days.
Fails to reproduce on macOS Version 26.6 (25G70) (but I can't post a reply on the forums because developer.apple.com currently hates me.)
I get the green triangle and `hasDrawable=1 status=0x8cd5 glError=0x0` which is the expected result.
XQuartz performance has been broken for a couple of years now and I believe it is primarily due to an OpenGL issue.
The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.
I read the comments before the link and thought this was a bit harsh, but reading that response I now feel the same way you do.
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.
Giving the Apple engineer (but not Apple) the benefit of the doubt I guess their policy is not to make any promises or announcements in that channel. They have probably said as much as they are allowed.
Forward looking statements can come from anyone and become sticky when considering security laws. Imagine everyone at Apple was sharing their full triage and timeline for every issue; one can then make informed decisions about their stock price, and investors could sue if those statements turned out to be misleading. At a certain point, the risk is too great.
Ok, but even if that were true , it costs nothing to say "we'll let you know when we think we have fixed the issue so you can then retest"
"Idk lol, it'll probably be fixed one day, keep testing and find out" is a pretty crappy response.
> please keep trying to reproduce this for us
There's an engineer that's used to solely interacting with agents.
You need to get your head out of your bubble and realize that this bug does not move the needle on anything meaningful.
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.
Why make the computer do anything but maximize dopamine and dollars flying out of your wallet? Why ship a calculator app you can't sell subscriptions on, a command line interface, an email suite? Can't make money on it so why do it right? Why let a hammer be a hammer and not let you gamble crypto with it too?
Because if you make enough decisions like that in a product that affects consumers and developers, eventually you turn into Adobe. Or worse, this guy.
Sure, but it doesn't change the argument. Adobe is doing really well if you look at the revenue. Adobes business is selling to governments and other large corporations that need compliance, its not to cater to the HN developers. Apple is the same, except in their case its the status symbol of having Apple products.
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.
Engineers and their companies are super users on whom the whole Apple ecosystem depends. If we can’t run our applications on Apple’s operating system, or they break things for our users, we will leave.
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.
That is just plain false and assigning over-importance to yourself.
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.
Ask the average Apple user if their device experience is getting better or worse over time. Most I know tell me things like they see small bug now where they didnt before, sometimes things dont work as they should, and more things needs a reset or even hard reset to fix. All very generic user reports.
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.
It’s true and I’m not. If the engineers can’t build software for your OS, your users won’t have software to use.
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.
> I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship. Your report is the right channel for the issue.
> 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.
Absolutely crazy that this is the engineers attitude. Not even something like "this has been added to our automated tests and will be tested with each new build". Just straight up asking a volunteer bug reporter to do their testing and reporting for them.
Apple is notoriously secretive about their development timelines and feature releases. This is normal Apple - they’d NEVER disclose that much.
Brings back memories of when macOS broke samba, coincidentally the moment I decided to switch off the brand.
I was banging my head against a wall for weeks when that happened, trying to figure out why all my Mac users suddenly couldn't access the shared network drives at work. Mac users being as they are, they defended the macs furiously and spent a week or two pointing fingers at me and my network capabilities.
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.
I never "upgraded" to macOS 15, but my situation is similar. None of my future computers will be Macs anymore. News like this only prove moving to Linux was the right decision in the nick of time.
It's a release candidate. That's what they are for, to catch bugs. Nothing to see here.
...except the interesting tidbits shared like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142208
I'm on macos 27. why are they still using 15?
Because Liquid Glass is an abomination. I use both 27 and 15 on different computers and Sequoia is just so much nicer to work with.
So they keep breaking previously functioning components even in older OS versions? I thought those were only getting security updates?
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.
You can ask an AI to go through my HN account and see that I used to be an unapologetic Apple fanbitch
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.
It might not be super healthy to be so emotionally invested in a company, its products, and its doings.
What's the qualifier for "so" (in "so emotionally invested")? Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?
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.
> Did someone measure it and it's beyond the healthy range?
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 "Apple fanbitch" was just a fun way to say they supported Apple and championed their products. Not a way to describe some emotional disregulation.
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.
Not having any attachment or inability to feel pain ain't good either.
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.
To calibrate, we're talking about an OpenGL bug in pre-release software.
To calibrate even better that's just what the TFA is concerned.
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.
I agree with you but buying in to Apple's ecosystem is more than just being emotionally invested in a company. If all of the hardware you bought is going to shit because of what Apple is doing then I think it's fair.
The hardware doesn't change after sale.
Ever heard of planned obsolescence? The hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others.
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.
Many of those examples are disingenuous. Planned obsolescence could explain some, 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. Of course physical objects change over time!
What exactly sounds "disingenuous" to you?
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?
It sounds like you expect products to have zero defects, under any circumstances. There's a wide margin between shitty products and perfect.
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.
>It sounds like you expect products to have zero defects, under any circumstances.
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 hardware absolutely changes after sale, there have been cases of keyboard's failing (e.g. during the butterfly keyboards), backlight failures (happened to some MBP runs), cracked displays (keys pressing into them), anti-reflective coating peeling, hinge issues (in several models), display failures (discoloration, light leaks), issues with (dedicated) GPUs in intel era models, battery expansions, logic board failures (there was a program that had 2-3 rounds or replacements), touch strip failures, and many others. Also ever heard of planned obselense?
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.
Oh yeah let's not be emotionally invested in the things you use everyday to do basically everything.
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.
> Stop bending over for mediocrity.
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.
...in the things you choose to use everyday to do basically everything
As you see, seeking validation for your anger is not well received when your own culpability goes missing.
I installed Asahi Linux on my Macbook Air recently and while it definitely took more effort than your grandparent would be capable of, it wasn't too bad. Getting FDE working was a pain for sure though.
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.
Those are issues with Asahi, but batter life is great on a Framework 13 pro, or anything with the new Panther Lake chipset.
I mean, I pretty much agree with everyone else here that Apple software quality has gone to shit recently but the issues you describe are just awful.
I would not use a laptop with those issues no matter the problems MacOS has currently.
There is already a better OS.
Yeah, just not on the aspects that matter to some of us.
Such as?
Such as the ability to run the commercial software I want to run - for music, video, etc.
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.
Linux? If someone can fix the ecosystem, I'm there.
What's wrong with the ecosystem? Hardware support is robust. Development is done out in the open and miles more professional than the slop Apple or Microsoft are putting out. Desktop environments, distro defaults and documentation are abundant and varied enough to support most user's needs. Besides hostile proprietary closed source software like Adobe or MS Office (of which alternatives are also abundant), what else could you need?
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These days you could just ask a bot to port your stuff from OpenGL to a newer API.
Backward compatibility is less of an issue when fixing legacy stuff takes $25 in tokens.
Unfortunately there is no universally supported newer API thanks to Apple.
Minecraft has been moving to Vulkan and using MoltenVK to run the same backend on Mac.
In that case maybe the answer is $200 in tokens to make a metal OpenGL shim and then share it to the community on GitHub.
Given the comparable performance of OpenGL and Metal on the same hardware I was under the impression that is how Apple had been implementing OpenGL for quite a while.
OpenGL on Apple GPUs is implemented on top of Metal with some private extensions to be closer to OpenGL behaviour. Making things work performantly on top of regular Metal is quite a bit harder.
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's true: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html
> 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.
Isn't https://github.com/google/angle just that?
Edit: I guess no, Angle is OpenGL ES. My bad.
> Angle is OpenGL ES
In practice this is sufficient for the overwhelming majority of apps. Apple never went past GL 4.1 on the desktop side, and doesn't support most of the interesting desktop-only features (tessellation and geometry shaders, mostly), so ES 3.1 targets desktop macOS fairly cleanly.
Metal is universally supported among Apple's product lines.
Just as useful as DirectX being universally supported in Microsoft's product lines.
The point of OpenGL was to have an API universally supported everywhere
That's a bad analogy
How so?
Both are os-specific graphics apis. It seems pretty comparable to me.
Why is it a bad analogy? I don't have experience on either of the libraries, so I may be missing something.
I can port _my_ stuff away from OpenGL, but can't port 3rd party or legacy software that I use.
"Why have X when Y costs $N in tokens" is becoming a tired thought-terminating cliche.
It shouldn't be user's responsibility to have to get their binaries to work at all costs.
Why, yes, of course, have all the devs in the world spend $25 and tons of time each, because Apple doesn't care about devs nor users.
/s