Back when I worked at Apple I would just try it in whatever I had installed. If it didn't reproduce I'd write "Cannot reproduce in 10.x.x" and close it. Maybe a third were like that, duplicates of some other issue that was resolved long ago.

Anyone that attached a repro file to their issue got attention because it was easy enough to test. Sometimes crash traces got attention, I'd open the code and check out what it was. If it was like a top 15 crash trace then I'd spend a lot longer on it.

If the ticket was long and involved like "make an iMovie and tween it in just such and such a way" then probably I'd fiddle around for 10-15 minutes before downgrading its priority and hope a repro file would come about.

There were a bunch of bug reports for a deprecated codec that I closed and one guy angrily replied that I couldn't just close issues I didn't want to fix!

Guess what buddy, nobody's ever going to fix it.

The oldest bug like that I ever fixed was a QuickDraw bug that was originally written when I was 8 years old but it was just an easy bounds check one liner.

But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.

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lapcat an hour ago | parent [-]

> But the mistake OP is making is assuming this one thing that annoyed him somehow applies to the whole Apple org. Most issues were up to engineers and project managers to prioritize, every team had their own process when I was there.

Except this same shit keeps happening with multiple teams.

Judging from your mention of QuickDraw, which was removed entirely from macOS in 2012, perhaps your Apple experience is now out of date.

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CoolGuySteve an hour ago | parent [-]

Nah, you're just making shit up.

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lapcat an hour ago | parent [-]

What specifically do you claim I'm making up?

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CoolGuySteve an hour ago | parent [-]

That the ~50000 engineers at Apple are conspiring to close your tickets in the exact same way. It's ridiculous

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lapcat 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Not my tickets specifically. I don't think they're out to get me individually. On the contrary, this is a common practice, which affects many developers. I just happen to be relatively loud, as far as blogging is concerned.

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CoolGuySteve 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes I understand that. ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way. It's a stupid line of thinking.

More than likely your steps to reproduce are too laborious to receive attention relative to the value fixing the bug would provide. That's why they're asking you to verify it still happens. Seems pretty simple right?

	▲	lapcat a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		> ~50000 engineers aren't conspiring to close all tickets that way. I didn't say that either. It's happened to me only sporadically, but multiple times. I agree with you that teams within Apple manage their own tickets. Perhaps some individual teams are declaring bug bankruptcy at some point, so only their bugs would go out for verification. I don't really know. I wish I did. What I do know is that multiple teams have done this at different points. > It's a stupid line of thinking. Please respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > More than likely your steps to reproduce are too laborious to receive attention. That's why they're asking you to do it. It was much more laborious for me, because I do not install the macOS betas. > Seems pretty simple right? No, it doesn't explain why specifically, after 3 years, they were suddenly asking me to verify with macOS 26.4 beta 4.