Apple owns up to a Snow Leopard bug

@FreeRange: "Gee – this is news? It took Apple only a month to fix a bug that only affected a very few people, and just a few other minor bugs."

It's the nature of the beast, as I see it: when you're doing well, everyone wants to pull you down. It doesn't matter if you're Apple, Microsoft, Google … or hell even the Dallas Cowboys; they want to see you do well — but not "too well", ya know? =) Even Rocky has to get beat up before he can stage a comeback and win at the end.

Anyway, initially I was worried about the reports of this bug but then the details came out and I had to shake my head in amazement that anyone ever had it happen at all. The Guest account is disabled by default and I, personally, can't think of a valid reason to enable it, but apparently a few people did. The fact that Apple took a month to fix it … meh, it took a while but it was a rather ridiculously rare bug so I'd call it a wash.

Definitely ditto a comment by an earlier poster (sorry, lost track of your post!) but "major" OS updates of any flavor are best handled by clean installs — after making a nice, full system backup, of course.

PED, nice follow up on a previous story. Thank you for keeping track of that, and informing us accordingly.

"2 weeks back connected my iPod touch to a new laptop boom deleted bunch of application without any warning or error."

I think Apple assumed you could read there. Probably not a good assumption. Your iPod is like a backup of selected files on your computer. If you 'sync' to that library, it is made to match the computer library or playlist, etc… If it was previously synced to another computer then that data will be replaced. But it's still on the other computer, just sync it back to that one if that is what you wanted!

If you don't want it to sync (to ONE computer, that's all you can SYNC to), just manage the content of your iPod manually, IE. Tell it not to sync, just drag huge numbers of items, or one at a time, or whatever (use smart playlists, etc…) to set it up just as you like, including content from all your computers if you like.

But this does require a brain. Someone that thinks MS is being up front with them? Those two traits don't really belong together IMHO.

Anonymous said: "Well here's the deal. FOr $399 I purchased a computer with an Nvidia 8400 m, 3GB of Ram, 250 GB hard drive and AMD Dual Core 2.0 GHz. It was a black friday sale, but still thats a $1499 Mac".
================================

No, that's less than what you get for a $799 Mac mini. But then the mini has OS X and all the iLife apps included. I'd take the mini any day over your Acer.

Gee – this is news? It took Apple only a month to fix a bug that only affected a very few people, and just a few other minor bugs. Meanwhile MSFT was never able to fix Vista!So the point is what? Apple is a far superior company to MSFT, as are its products. Period.

@ Rich in Boston. I'll bite.

"Apple has bugs? No kidding!! Apple has MANY bugs. Macs are way over priced and have lots of connectivity issues."
How is over pricing something a bug? And what are the connectivity issues that you are claiming?

"For all practical purposes, they do not exist in the business world."
Strange that keep telling yourself that and you may believe it… Apple is doing pretty damn well these days.

"Apple is also THE MOST protectionoist company – to portect its profits."
You reserve your right to not buy one – there are plenty of people who do though, protectionism or not. I will point out that Microsoft are actually a convicted monopolist for trying to protect their interests.

"THAT is why most IT departments laugh when asked about converting to macs – do not believe mr engineer above."
So completely ignore what was written by ML in Ocala then.

BTW PED: I think it would be worth trying to follow up ML's assertion re: Microsoft Site Licenses – if true it would be an outrageous thing for Microsoft to claim.

"Stick with what 90% of the world runs. PC – for when you grow up."
You are the one throwing the toys out of the pram. Perhaps you should take your own advice.

This thread is as entertaining as the PC/MAC commercials !!

Reminds me of a song from the 60's with the line,….'people carrying signs,…mostly say hooray for our side,… '

Why was this story originally published a month ago? Sloppy writing.

ex ped: It's an update, Jason. Apple on Monday corrected a problem they owned up to — and we wrote about — a month ago.

How come all the people who criticise Macs are totally ignorant about the subject (the evidence is in these comments) but the people supporting Macs know in depth what they're talking about and can write intelligbly about the subject? Doesn't that tell you something?

Oh, and the most incredibly ignorant of all the criticisers is the one who suggests that Macs are for people who don't want their own personality. Since when has NOT following the majority been an example of not having a personality?

Apple has bugs? No kidding!! Apple has MANY bugs . Macs are way over priced and have lots of connectivity issues. For all practical purposes, they do not exist in the business world. Apple is also THE MOST protectionoist company – to portect its profits. THAT is why most IT departments laugh when asked about converting to macs – do not believe mr engineer above. Stick with what 90% of the world runs. PC – for when you grow up.

B.J., you should just beat up those stupid IT. It is becaus of such idiots that normal people have to go to suffer by using microsoft crap.

To B.J. from Los Angeles

"use a real computer not a mac. there's a reason the world majority is on PCs"

1. What is a "real" computer? Why do you say that macs are not "real"?

2. What, exactly, is the reason that the world majority is on PCs? I'm interested to know what you think this reason is.

In the early 1990s, I worked at a engineering firm of about 200 people, half of which were engineers (like me), the other half being executives, admin, and staff. The engineers used UNIX workstations, everyone else used Windows PCs. We (the engineers) also used a number of Macs, because Macs supported Asian fonts, which the PCs could not support at that time. The Macs were great — easy to network using AppleTalk and later EtherTalk, easy to add printers, easy to share files and folders over the network, never caused any problems.

Well, every Garden of Eden has its snake, and ours was the head of the IT department who absolutely hated Macintosh, for reasons that we never understood. (He told us he would never be caught dead using one.) First, he announced that due to "high maintenance costs", all Macs would be replaced with PCs. We were astonished — high maintenance costs? What was he talking about? Our Macs just kept humming along without a glitch. This caused an uproar among the engineers, who liked and wanted to keep the Macs.

We wrote documents using FrameMaker, which was not available on the PC. "Why don't you use Word?" the IT guy asked. We told him that we had tried Word, but abandoned it because Word behaves erratically and causes data loss when the document is more than 100 pages or so (we were producing 500-plus page user and reference manuals with pictures, tables, appendices, etc.), doesn't handle outlining well, doesn't allow separate numbering for chapters, tables, and figures, doesn't have a nice set of picture editing tools, doesn't handle columns and column flow at all, and so on. IT guy didn't care. "I never have a problem with Word" he grumbled to a co-worker — but he never wrote a document that was more than 5 pages long, either.

So, he didn't take away our Macs. Instead, he did something even more insidious: he refused to upgrade them, repair them, or replace them with new Macs. Need more memory? Sorry, no can do. My Mac's hard drive is failing? Too bad. I guess you'll have to use this PC from now on. New Mac OS available. Nope. "We don't actively support toy computers." Toy computers? Our "toy" Macs supported networking, file sharing, multiple user accounts, postscript printing, the aforementioned Asian fonts, and many other features long before the "serious" PCs could. We struggled along for years, until finally all of the Macs wore out from continuous use. Then we had to use PCs because there was nothing else to use.

Fast forward to the present. I found out recently that in 1995 or so, Microsoft began approaching companies that had big deployments of PCs and would do an "audit" to verify that all PCs were running legitimately purchased copies of Windows. This would be time consuming, expensive to the company, and — here's the kicker — if any illegal copies of Windows were found, the MS reps said, news of this was very likely to somehow make it to the press that our company was engaging in illegal activities. Of course, the IT guy was very nervous — could he verify that every computer in the place had been installed using its own, separate installer disk and its own, separate license key? He could not, of course, since the Techs would purchase a 10-pack of licenses but use the same license key for each install. They had bought and paid for all of the licenses, but when 10 PCs had the same code, it would, in fact, look suspicious.

The MS reps were very, very sympathetic to our desire not to have negative press, and that is why they offered my company an opportunity to avoid this whole unpleasant business by buying a site license, which would cover all PCs in the building, no questioned asked. Well, the site license was a bit on the expensive side, but our IT guy decided he'd better do it. "Oh, and by the way", the MS rep said "one of the conditions of the site license is that you don't have any other OS on the site." No other OS on the site?? Again, the MS reps were very, very sorry, but said, "Hey– if you don't like it, we'll start the auditing process tomorrow. What time do you open in the morning?"

THAT, it turns out, is why the IT guy was so adamant to remove the Macs: because he was being essentially blackmailed by MS to get rid of competing OSes upon threat of unpleasant action and negative press from MS. I've since heard that this happened all over the country.

So… B.J. from Los Angeles, you are right that there's a reason that the world majority is on PCs. It's just that the reason is that MS engages in shady business practices to protect their crappy product. It has nothing to do with technical superiority.

I'm not sure I agree that Apple refuses to admit its bugs, I think it just tells them to their users as apposed to the press. Updates for any apple hardware or software are fairly regular. And they always list in plain text exactly what its fixing. IE. it will say "this is an update to fix a known bug that causes such and such problems." Windows obviously has updates too but not as easily laid out. (they simply say security update). Now fairly computer savy people may be able to find what specific problem it fixes but I'm a pretty average user, and I appreciate it being in an easy to read format. Now obviously this comes once the problem has been reported and fixed, but I would say most bugs any computer company has they find out about from users.

Truth be told apple really is super fast with solving issues. I'll give you a good example. The first keynote I made in iWorks 09 (which was brilliant by the way!!) I attempted to convert to a powerpoint and it simply wouldn't let me. It gave me a error discription. I called apple, and with their reps we were able to discover that custom axis definitions I was creating for a graph was conflicting with the cross over to a power point. Once we discovered that and found an alternative (which I admitadly wasn't to happy with) the rep asked me to speak to one of their tech people. I re-explained it to him and thought that was that. a week and a half later an update for iWorks came out and funny enough one of the bug fixes was for the exact issue I had!! I wasn't as huge a deal as this data loss issue and I'm sure alot of it was timing but still I thought it was pretty good .

In retrospect I think MS is probably more prone to a press release as they have a lot larger client base to reach around the world, and regardless of how it reflects on them, its the best way to probably make people aware and save their data, especially since its to do with a mobile device and not their PC's.

@Alienistic: Incredibly ignorant comment. I'll clear up some things for you which you seem to be so sure about:

Mac OS X is built on Darwin (not Linux). So you're way off on that. Darwin is distinct from most *nix OSes out there, using the Mach microkernel and many elements of BSD.

You're also wrong in calling Mac OS X a Window Manager. You seem to be confusing the Finder with the operating system itself. The Finder is just one of the many processes that the operating system runs. You can use OS X from the command line; I did it all the time back in college so I could compile projects with GCC and not have to bother with Xcode.

Plus you're incredibly misinformed about the origins of Unix. Unix is not a "PC Platform". Unix was written in C (technically a higher-level language) specifically so that it could be ported to different platforms since back when it was developed every computer mainframe company had its own processors and hardware.

This is why I ALWAYS do clean installs of Mac OS X. Upgrades are shaky, it's impossible to consider every possible scenario. Plus, doing clean installs allows you to clean up old files, unused apps, and other crap. But I always buy PowerMacs/Mac Pros and just put the new install on a new hard disk which not everyone can do.

If more then 11 people used an Apple product we might hear of other issues. Apple is for people who don't want their own personality. It's like the first Ford cars: you can have any color as long as it is black.

You might be able to buy similar basic technology on a PC for less than the sticker price of a Mac, but do you get media software and access to a vastly superior system?

I love PC users who tell me how much better Microsoft's products are then tell me about the hacks they have to use to do things I do on my Mac easily.

Elegance used to mean something in engineering. I have had dozens of friends and clients buy Apple computers just to run Windows (because Apple hardware runs it better). All of them eventually deleted their Windows partition and all of them thanked me.

@Alienistic, Mac OS X is not built on Linux. It is built on BSD, which is a totally different clone of Unix then the Linux codebase.

Might I remind you MAC users that MAC uses a Linux core (yes from PC yet modified for MAC use) and Leopard is primarily a Desktop Environment/Window Manager just like Gnome & KDE & Metacity & several others built for LINUX. So whats this boil down to.. MAC uses a PC platform (LINUX/UNIX).
BTW UNIX has been around much longer than MAC OR WINDOWS!

Well here's the deal. FOr $399 I purchased a computer with an Nvidia 8400 m, 3GB of Ram, 250 GB hard drive and AMD Dual Core 2.0 GHz. It was a black friday sale, but still thats a $1499 Mac.

Wow, the power of a blog. Comparing an OS bug to a SAN failure? How does that pit Apple's engineering know-how against Microsoft's? The Danger failure is attributed to a storage vendor's (HDS) cock-up, and not to a programming bug from MS. The three "accounts of the problems" were not even accounts of the problem, but discussions of the Danger purchase by MS. Danger/MS/T-moble should be held accountable for the lack of a backup, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with an Apple OS bug…

"And to those drawing comparisons with whiney younger kids: When was it that Apple was founded again? PC users looking forward to MS Office 10 for Windows. Mac users had v.10 in 2001. Presently, we're on v.12. So a better comparison is the elder sibling who points to their younger sibling saying 'they screwed up worse!'"

Dude, do you even know what MS Office is?!? So, Mac users have been using Office 2010… since 2001?!? I guess Apple it's truly ahead of it's time, even when the application is made by Microsoft.

apple may be hard to admit it, but M$ has had issues and REFUSES to fix them.APPle at least makes an attempt. You have to expect bugs with new apple releases, hardware or software, but they do in the end usually get it right with version 2.

unfortunately, apple has made so many programming changes as of late, developers are having harder time, including myself in keeping up.Never liked dos, nor windows.I'm an ubuntu user and I'll stick with unix, whether FPOS, or another flavor, any day over windows. Apple's OS, well, its nice, but for nice and bleeding edge you pay the 'unstable' price for it. seems the best way around this is NOT to enable the guest account. (surprise,surprise…)

use a real computer not a mac. there's a reason the world majority is on PCs

"Whats even more disappointing is that Microsoft has been developing faulty products for well over 20 years, and no one is surprised enough to take notice."

Maybe only people who wear tinfoil hats have noticed. The rest of us get along just fine with Microsoft OS, thank you.

Durpee, durpee, dur!!!! The keyboard users crave… clowns. Self-absorbed clowns. There is not one single person in this Country that actually- do or die- NEEDS access 24/7- MAYBE the Prez. The rest of you seriously need to get over yourselves. Finance, law, management…expendable. Aside from the fact that all that "highly paid talent" was too stupid to backup their own info.

I have to say, that as a new Mac user, the biggest difference between Mac and PC is that PC admits its faults and Mac generally doesn't. It's very frusterating.

Because the writer although says he is "outside" the distortion field is hardly anything more that a thinly veiled fanboi.

The title of this article is "Apple owns up to a Snow Leopard bug" but more than half of it is devoted to an MS bug affecting a single platform.

Why does Apple 2.0 news always seem so hellbent on reporting MS / PC negatives?

This inferiority complex (and since it clearly is an inferiority complex, let me just point out that I'm not saying Apple is inferior, but that Apple 2.0 seems to think it is – hence the devotion to letting us all know how horrible MS really is..) is getting out of hand. Can't you just report on Apple news and leave MS and PC out of it? Or at least try to devote more than 50% of the article to Apple?

Quick follow up, Office 2010 that is coming out that you said how PC users are looking forward to because you have had since 2001, is Office v.14. So, Microsoft still ahead of the v.12 for Mac…

@Jared

You realize Microsoft manufactures the Mac version of Office too, right? Mac's version of Office v.X wasn't called v.10. It was called v.X to match up with Mac OS X, not match the date like 2010. So, I highly doubt you were running Office 2010 on your computer in 2001, sorry.

I agree, the article is biased & not talking about the title's topic.

While the article is biased, and fails to really talk about the Apple Bug; it also draws a comparison between the size of the bug for the 2 companies. Unlike the MS/Sidekick issue- which caused a total loss of data & backups, people who own a machine that runs 10.5 (and most intel-Macs did from the time they were purchased, and older PPC chips don't run on 10.6)- it includes a build-in backup. So if you did what Apple said you should, no harm- no foul to your data.

And regardless of what platform you use, you know that Hard-drives are complicated & failure-prone technology, so a good backup is required!

And to people commenting about Macs being toys: NASA doesn't play with toys (they may screw up the metric vs imperial, but thats different). All those TV & Print ads are made on Macs, even though the software is on both platforms. Enjoy a puny spread-sheet, and I'll use CGI & FCP.

And to those drawing comparisons with whiney younger kids: When was it that Apple was founded again? PC users looking forward to MS Office 10 for Windows. Mac users had v.10 in 2001. Presently, we're on v.12. So a better comparison is the elder sibling who points to their younger sibling saying 'they screwed up worse!'

@Brian

No comparable backup solution? Sorry but that made me laugh so hard my co-workers looked at me funny.

Backup and SyncToy have been around longer then Time Machine. The only thing Time Machine did was make it a pretty interface.

Oh there's also something out there called Windows Home Server. Cheap, reliable, and keeps all your PC's backed up including file duplication.

"Also whats a fanboy?
Posted By Winnipeg, MB: October 13, 2009 3:19 PM "

Not sure if you're still checking this, but a fanboy is someone that is insanely and irrationally devoted and biased towards a single subject/company/hobby/comic/movie/game/OS/cell phone/etc and will aggressively defend it… to a point where it's a religious devotion to that one item. It's actually a derogatory term used towards that group of people by other groups that feel they are less serious fans than the others, and hence more rational in their arguments. It happens mostly when it's a 1 vs 1 comparison, like this PC vs Mac… because the groups get larger and more vocal.

MS fanboys, it is relevant when discussing a problem to talk about similar issues competitors have.

I think you MS fanboys are really getting rather worried that MS is going to lose their monopoly status. Then where will they be? It's not like they ever actually did anything other than dream up ways to protect the monopoly.

The snow leopard bug is very rare, and totally avoidable. There is TIME MACHINE, use it, you can't lose data with that feature turned on.

Microsoft has no comparable backup solution. And no hope of keeping it's monopoly. Call me a fanboy if it makes you feel better. LOL

PED when are you guys going to arrange the comments chronologically starting with the first post first and not last.

ex ped: When WordPress allows readers to choose it as a preference.

Does this author EVER write an article that doesn't mention MS in it? If you believe Apple is so great, why does every one of your article contain a low-blow to MS? In the business world people use PCs. Not toys.

"Mac news from outside the reality distortion field"…..right.

Typical biased article from this author. Even when Apple screws up he has to bring up something that MS did. Its like the little kid who cries "well my older brother did it too!".

Every day this author regurgitates some Apple news and out come the fanboys to lick it all up.

ex ped: Now that's a metaphor even my dog can appreciate.

Heh… I read this and I can't help but hear in my mind the music from those "I'm a Mac" commercials.

"Hi, Mac."
"Not now, PC. My user has lost all of his important data."

Beta test 1.0 version losers are one of natures more melancholy yet pervasive spectacles.

These are the true patriots of the technological light brigade. They get into the front ranks, searching for glory, and are then inevitably cut down by software bugs and bad ideas.

If you are running snow leopard with all your data right now, you are a beta test 1.0 version loser, and the world will issue upon you a bounty of pain.

You are the chaff amid the wheat. You must perish so that wiser folks can thrive.

I want to point a important different between Apple won't give you a warning when something terrible happens where as MS does. out right Apple assumes that you are stupid enough not to understand error message.

2 weeks back connected my iPod touch to a new laptop boom deleted bunch of application without any warning or error.

Also whats a fanboy? I switched over to Mac and very much prefer it to Windows, does that make me a fanboy?? It seems like every time I ready someone talking about how much they enjoy their Mac there is someone right behind them calling them a "fanboy"? Is there some meaning to it? Also is there some punch line nickname for people who enjoy windows?? lol Maybe I just don't blog enough..

I don't understand the argument.. has any operating system ever actually claimed it will never get bugs?? Is that even possible?? From what I've seen and read it seems like Mac's get a lot less.. However any attention brought to Mac for this bug I would say they kinda had coming.. I mean they literally run a Massive add campaign every time something goes wrong at Microsoft, they have to expect the retaliation.

That's the problem with smart-a** young kids–they grow up to be parents themselves.

Article summary: "Yes, Apple screwed up. But look, look, MS did even worse!!"
Childish at best…

@James, NY, NY – spelling it M$ doesn't make you cool. It just makes you look foolish and MS didn't design the cloud system that went down.

@Matt, Tamp, FL

Like any iCult member you assume too much and spread FUD. MS didn't design anything about the Sidekick cloud system. They purchased Danger and the system that it came with.

My only question is why was there no offsite backup data? It will be interesting when we get more information about this issue other then the PR stuff about main and backup databases being lost.

@Andrew
"Where are the legions of apple fanboys to post on this article? Oh wait its a bug with an Apple product thats why. Maybe we should all condemn snow leopard now as the worst operating system ever without actually trying it."

Yeah, right. It's just that a whole lot of people with Snow Leopard haven't experienced this. It seems to be some extreme condition which Apple are working on. Unlike, say, sidekick where it was everyone that experienced the outage and the data loss.

@ James
"Ah… While I don't want to defend M$ here, M$ had nothing to do with that data loss."

…other than they owned the company and spend millions every year promoting their ability to safely back up your data using their technology – but appeared to be unable to integrate the solutions they are selling with a technology they own.

Maybe we're all looking at it the wrong way: Apple will probably spin this as the new "Secure Delete" feature of Snow Leopard. Your Data has never been safer; so safe, in fact, you can't even access it yourself.

What gives…the article was supposed to be about Snow Leopard and it rambles on about a Microsoft bug? Either you are a bad journalist or a MAC hack…or both.

Good information PED.

Nobody is perfect, not Apple, not MS, not Google or any of the various Unix/ Linux vendors. Dig deep enough and you will find something serious to complain about with them all. I currently use OSX, Windows, Linux & IBM AIX. None of them are perfect, all of them do suit certain uses very well. If OSX suits your needs and uses great, don't bash someone else for deciding that Windows suits their needs, (the reverse is also true, Windows guys).

The important piece of information that is missing from this article is, when does Apple plan to send out the patch to fix this.

As an Apple fan I must admit that this is disappointing to hear. In all fairness, it seems that this has only occurred in an isolated number of cases. Like any product, theres always an error margin, thats the beauty of a manufacturer's warranty.

Whats even more disappointing is that Microsoft has been developing faulty products for well over 20 years, and no one is surprised enough to take notice.

Ah… While I don't want to defend M$ here, M$ had nothing to do with that data loss. The data wasn't housed by M$, M$ didn't schedule the upgrade, and M$ wasn't responsible for backing up the data. Now you could argue that M$ messed up with a pure "cloud" style storage, but hey, everyone is high on cloud computing so why would anyone want to store personal data locally?

You are pathetic. In an article supposedly about Apple's Snow Leopard bug, you talked more about Microsoft.

Sounds like a horrible issue in Snow Leopard…hope it doesn't happen to me. A few weeks back, a number of times when I logged in the desktop would appear blank. After a cold start it returned to normal with my regular icons.

Where are the legions of apple fanboys to post on this article? Oh wait its a bug with an Apple product thats why. Maybe we should all condemn snow leopard now as the worst operating system ever without actually trying it.

Does anyone else get that Microsoft may have invited problems from the start by naming a division Danger?

ex ped: It was called Danger before they purchased it. See here.

Not to mention the Snow Leopard bug, while upsetting, is recoverable. ( though not pretty unless you have time machine enabled ) , while the sidekick problem is inexcusably destroying all backups of data

Has Steve Ballmer filed for unemployment yet?