Mac OS X Yosemite: Buggy POS, or is my Mac just dying?

Factual Questions
1

I have been a Mac user for nearly 20 years. My first Mac ran System 7.6.1, and since then, four Macs later, I have happily upgraded to each new version of the Mac OS as soon as it became commercially available. Each and every OS upgrade was an improvement over the previous version.

Until Yosemite.

Here are some of the problems I’ve experienced, on a daily basis, since “upgrading” to Yosemite:

• I have been using the same e-mail client, PowerMail, for more than 15 years. This mail client has been one of the most rock-solid, dependable pieces of software I’ve ever used. But, since upgrading to Yosemite, PowerMail is constantly choking on certain e-mails (I haven’t yet been able to narrow down which e-mails are the problem.) By “choking”, I mean I come home from work to find an alert telling me that PowerMail has crashed. Relaunching PowerMail just ends up getting me a “spinning beachball of death”, as it chokes on … something … while attempting to download new messages. I have to resort to logging into my domain host’s webmail option in Chrome, where I delete everything “suspicious” in my inbox so that PowerMail doesn’t have to try to download it.

• Clicking on a link in an e-mail opens a browser window, but instead of bringing my browser to the foreground like it’s supposed to, the browser window remains in the background.

• Quitting all open apps doesn’t seem to register. I can quit everything, and using Command+Tab shows me that the Finder is the only thing running. But, if I look at the Dock, all of those apps that I just closed are still showing as “running” in the Dock. This presents a problem when I’m trying to Restart my Mac. I attempt to Restart (Apple Menu -> Restart), and my Mac will just sit there, apparently doing nothing, or everything will appear to close out, except that I’m left staring at my Desktop, sans menubar and Dock, with nothing else happening, or my screen will go black and remain that way without Restarting. I’m forced to hold down the power button to physically shut down, and then hit the power button again to restart.

That is just a sampling of the problems I’ve been having lately. Granted, my current Mac is a 2008 iMac, with a dead internal hard drive (although, yay, I just located a tutorial that shows me how to open up this machine and replace the hard drive). I’ve been running it off an external drive for more than a year. But everything still worked perfectly while I was running the previous version of Mac OS X (Lion?). Every single problem I’m having started immediately after I “upgraded” to Yosemite.

My previous Mac history:

First Mac experience: A Mac SE30 running System 6 at my community college.

First owned Mac: 1996. A PowerMac 7200/75MHz. I unfortunately picked the only Mac available at the time that didn’t have an upgradable processor. I used that Mac from System 7.6.1 through Mac OS 8.

Second owned Mac: 1998? A used PowerMac 7600/120MHz. This was virtually identical to the 7200, except that the processor was upgradable. The first thing I did was upgrade to a G3 processor, taking it from 120MHz to 1GHz. Mac OS 8 through Mac OS 9.

Third owned Mac: 2001. I bought a PowerMac G4 tower. 1.3GHz. That G4 lasted me for seven years, and over the course of my ownership I made every single possible upgrade to that machine. RAM maxed, installed a bigger hard drive, added a second hard drive, replaced the CDROM drive with a Superdrive (CD/DVD), replaced the video card with something better, upgraded the processor to 2.1GHz. Mac OS 9 through … Mac OS X 10.3, I think? (What was the current Mac OS X in 2008?)

Fourth, and current owned Mac: Early 2008 iMac. Again, every OS upgrade that came along, and it’s served me well (aside from the internal hard drive). Everything was swell until Yosemite.

I can’t help recognizing that Yosemite is the first version of Mac OS X to be released without Steve Jobs’ oversight. I find myself actually hoping that it’s just me and that Apple wouldn’t actually release such a piece of shit OS. Because if it’s Yosemite, and not me, I can’t help thinking that Jobs would never have let this out the door.

2

I use Yosemite pretty heavily for software development and scientific computing. Have had no major issues with Yosemite on my 2012 MacBook Pro, it has been quite solid.

3

Okay, this is hilarious. I typed into Google, “downgrade from”, and the autocomplete filled in “Yosemite to Mavericks”.

Apparently, I’m not the only one having problems.

4

Yosemite seems fine to me…though Apple does have an annoying way of pretending that no bugs exist, which makes the user question their own sanity.

My own gripe is that they promise the Photos app is the future, and Aperture is being retired. What people don’t get is that Aperture is professional-grade software, while Photos seems aimed squarely at the average Joe. I have joined many others in jumping ship over to Lightroom, an inferior product (IMHO) that is actually being supported and improved, while the better product is being discarded.

Anyway, I wish you luck with your hard drive. I followed one of those tutorials on a 2008 iMac a few years ago and can happily report success. Do note that it feels downright scary to be so deep into the machine’s guts: the surgery seems far more intrusive than replacing a hard drive should be.

5

I know, right? When I had that G4 tower, it was all, “pull that old shit out, and plug in the new shit”. I didn’t need a video tutorial to tell me how to do it. But these damned iMacs are sealed up tight.

6

Typing that last post from my Windows laptop, because I mistakenly moved my cursor to the “activate screensaver” corner, and the screen decided to stay black no matter what.

7

I’ve never used PowerMail, but I do know this- the most recent version, 2.6.1, is almost a year and half old. The PowerMail website does not list Yosemite as supported. It only says Mavericks support is new to 2.6.1. So that’s probably your problem right there. Not a Yosemite problem, but a PowerMail problem.

Your problem with clicking on links in emails might also be because of PowerMail. But try this- in Safari, go to Preferences > Tabs > check the “When a new tab or window opens, make it active” box. Dunno if that will help, but it’s worth a shot.

Did you previously download Mavericks from the Mac App Store using the same Apple ID you are using now? If you did, you can redownload Mavericks and install it (I think). Go to the Purchases tab of the Mac App Store and if Mavericks is listed there, grab it and make it work for you.

As a last resort, download the Yosemite 10.10.2 combo update from Apple here and reinstall it. Ten bucks says it won’t help anything, but again it’s worth a shot.

There is a lot about Yosemite that sucks the sweat off a dead donkey’s balls, but it has nothing to do with the absence of Steve Jobs. You’re worried that he would “never” have let it out the door? Here’s a list of monkey diarrhea Steve thought was gangbusters- the G4 Cube, Ping, the hockey puck mouse, FCP X. Also, you probably shouldn’t be sticking up for the guy- imagine the words he’d use to describe someone running an iMac off an external drive… :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Since you’re having screen issues too, try running the Apple Hardware Test. Restart and hold down the D key until the instructions come up.

9

Ah, that could be it. I didn’t realize it had been that long. PowerMail also uses a third-party spam filter, SpamSieve, and SpamSieve has continued to be updated regularly, so I guess I just didn’t notice that PowerMail itself hadn’t had an upgrade in a while.

I’m not convinced that that one is directly related to PowerMail. When I’ve freshly booted my Mac, the “bring the browser to the foreground” behavior works correctly. The “misbehavior” only starts after I’ve been logged in for an extended period of time, or more often, after I’ve switched to a different user account and then back again. In any case, the “bring the browser to the foreground” behavior is a system setting, not a PowerMail setting. IOW, clicking on a link in PowerMail is correctly opening the link in a browser window, but the OS isn’t then bringing the browser forward.

I’ll give that a try, though this misbehavior still seems to be a software issue.

I thought I’d also mention that I run the Avast! anti-virus software, and it shows that I’m “clean”.

10

I’ve heard anecdotally that Yosemite has lots of fit-and-finish problems, more than any recent up date of OS X. I wouldn’t blame it on the absence of Steve Jobs, more the drain on resources that must have resulted from developing Apple Watch.

11

I’ve be using Yosemite on 3 machines for months, and have not experienced any serious issues.

12

Glad to hear it, 'cuz I’m finally upgrading next week.

13

One of my laptops, a MacBook Pro (late 2011 vintage) had to have the hard drive replaced last month. It died in the middle of upgrading from Mavericks to Yosemite.

Apple Store technician didn’t say it was absolutely connected, but considering the amazing coincidence of the timing, he could not say it WAS NOT connected.

14

I’m on a late '13 MacBook Pro, and I think Yosemite is far more solid than Mavericks was.

Same for my '10 12-Core MacPro.

I actually quite love it.

15

Downloaded it, tried to open it, and got a message that says it’s too old and cannot be opened under Yosemite.

16

FWIW, you don’t really need to run anti-virus software. At the very least, it’s probably inconveniencing you more than any help it has ever given you.

If you have a Time Machine backup of Mavericks, you could use that to get Mavericks back. Failing that, here is how to make a Mavericks Installer Drive. It will have to be a clean install, however, so make sure to back up your data first.

17

My first thought regarding your PowerMail problems was that it wasn’t updated to run in Yosemite. I think zbuzz is correct.

I have the same iMac as you do — 2008 — though my machine’s hard drive still works.

My first Mac was an LC, 40-meg hard drive with System 7 installed at the factory. Before that, I used Macs at work running System 6 (and the LC would run System 6). So I’ve run every system from 6 to 9.x before loading OS 10.2 into my G3. It was glacial, so I went back to 9, then bought a G4.

After a final full-system backup, last weekend I clean-installed Yosemite into my iMac, booting from the installer on a thumb drive — extreeeeeeemly slow, but it works — as directed by instructions on YouTube (see below).

I have had no problems. And there has been no slowdown except for secure empty trash; grass would grow twice as fast in the Sahara. Aside from that and as with every major-release upgrade, my iMac runs faster than it did under the previous major release, so much so with Yosemite that I’ve had to insert new delays into a few of my personal AppleScripts — the processor couldn’t keep up and the script would fail.

I won’t load a major-release operating system over the old. Well, I tried it once with OS X, way back with Leopard or Tiger (can’t recall which), despite having problems pre-OS X upgrading major releases over the old (the more things change, the more things stay the same). The Leopard or Tiger upgrade over the old one caused problems, just as I experienced pre OS X, so I wiped it and clean-installed the new one, thereby banishing the gremlins.

I followed these instructions on YouTube, to ensure Yosemite would have a recovery partition. I didn’t bother to find out whether the other methods really would or would not provide the partitioned system.

This may be unlikely because you’re using an external disk, but your current installation may have the second, recovery system installed inside a partition. If so, you could download Yosemite again (if you haven’t saved it) and clean-install it from the recovery partition.

To find out if you have the recovery system, see if it’s listed at the top-left of Disk Utility. Or restart the machine while holding down the Option key. If you see its icon, click on it and restart, to make sure it works. To return to the main system, restart and hold down the Option key again.

Regarding anti-virus software, I have to echo zbuzz and add that any anti-virus software on a Mac is a useless waste of money (if it’s not free) and of cpu cycles (even if it is), unless you like finding the occasional Windows virus lying dormant in an email, which, along with pre-OS X Mac viruses that can’t run on an OS X system any more than a Windows virus can, is all any of them can search for.

They may advertise that they’ll search out and destroy Mac viruses, but that’s pure fluff; there aren’t any Mac viruses except the very few that can run only on System 9 or before).

Since there are none, no anti-virus software would know what to look for, by name or by architecture.

18

I remember the Tiger upgrade was notorious for blue-screening people’s machines, like it did mine. Worst Upgrade Install Ever.

19

Sorry zombie my own thread, but I have new information, maybe only helpful to me.

I noticed that one of the kids I work with uses an iPhone (he’s the only one - everybody else has Android phones - well, except for me; I have a flip phone because I hate telephones and only own one because I have to), so I asked him if he also uses a Mac. Yup, he does.

I described my Mac’s symptoms to him, and … he has been having exactly the same problems. And his PowerBook is four years younger than my iMac. Just like me, his problems started immediately after he upgraded to Yosemite.

Oh, and yes, I just discovered that Mac OS X “El Capitan” is available. I’ll upgrade soon, to see if it fixes the problems. Though it’s not encouraging to see that it has a 2.5 stars (out of 5) rating in the App Store …

20

Also … “Mavericks” … “Yosemite” … “El Capitan” …

WTH happened to codename thematic consistency?