SOCIAL: Mac crash question...

[Kelly hawk]

As an apple employee, I can tell you that those crash logs do go  
somewhere when you press "send to apple." And they get a lot of  
attention. Exec's see overall stats, and us peon's get assigned bugs  
for specific crashes we're expected to fix as quickly as possible.
When I first started getting those reports roughly 5 years ago, I  
discovered I could fix 85% of iMovie's crashes by fixing 5 simple  
bugs. The results were nothing less than amazing. So great, that they  
expanded the program over time, and in Snow Leopard, the OS records  
things that make that spinning rainbow wheel of death happen, and let  
you send those in too. And machine freezes. And in some cases, just  
strange goings-on that Apple is curious about. All of it is sent in  
anonymously - Apple has no way to know who sent it in. And it is only  
sent with your consent. Writing short comments in the report can help,  
e.g. what you were doing when it crashed.
Unfortunately for you, today, there's no instant gratification.  
There's no easy way to interpret what's going on without access to the  
source code. And once a fix is identified, it has to be rolled into an  
official release, which can take time, because even a small change  
requires many person-months of testing, packaging, localization, etc,  
before it can go out the door. Unfortunately, the legal and finance  
teams don't let  anyone say what a team fixed specifically - that  
could be construed either as a promise or some sort of new feature  
that requires charging money. so updates tend to say very little, e.g.  
"resolves some minor stability issues"
So please keep sending those things to Apple, and things will get  
better, even if you never know exactly how or when.
-- Kelly --

On Oct 30, 2009, at 8:44 PM, Eric Arons wrote:

> Is there anyone out there who thinks they can read the crash log on  
> the Mac to get an idea of what led to the crash?  I've had some  
> consistent and serious crashes, and while I'm definitely going to  
> upgrade soon, I'm trying to determine if there's an intermediate fix  
> I can go through.  If so, contact me, and I'll send you the logs  
> that I've saved.  I do have one specific trigger.  If I run iTunes,  
> it eventually dies.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eric
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