zerosleeps

I’ve spent a lot of time recently moaning about rogue and undocumented macOS processes and Apple’s unawareness of and/or disinterest in doing anything about them.

I was thinking about it again when I was reading through the comments on a post on Hacker News about Process Explorer for macOS. It’s clear that I’m not alone in wanting to know what is going on with my computer.

Maybe it’s because I come from a time where you had to watch these things because in the olden days resources were much more precious and a busy CPU was much more obvious. Everything would start feeling slower, and things would start getting hot and noisy.

And that got me thinking… a lot of the problems I have experienced with macOS started after Apple transitioned to Apple silicon. Apple’s M-series chips are so absurdly efficient that unless you go looking for a runaway process you’d never know about it. There is no excess heat and there is no fan noise, especially if a rogue process is doing its thing mainly on efficiency cores.

So maybe, just maybe, there’s an “out of sight out of mind” thing going on here. Maybe the bugs I complain about are much more widespread than web search results would have you believe, but without any hot and noisy physical manifestation only a tiny percentage of Apple’s customers even notice them. And a tiny percentage of those users will kick up a fuss. And if nobody is shouting about this stuff and Apple’s developers have other things to fix and build, well they just never get looked at.