SOCIAL: Mac crash question...

[Joel Young]

In general, follow Kelly's advice. :) In this case, it was a kernel panic log, and it looks like his hard drive is dying. I gave him some help with it.

Joel

On Oct 30, 2009, at 8:56 PM, Kelly hawk wrote:

> 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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