The OS X Error That Should Not Be

“What I love about OS X is how stable it is.”

“Oh, I know! I haven’t had to reboot in like a month.”

Previously • Cabel Sasser Finds OS X’s “Awesomest Finder Bug of All Time” [BBG]

1. [strider_mt2k]

   See how far behind Windows OSX is?

   How long has it taken them to close the crazy error message gap??

   I’m not wishing error messages on anyone, but a little perspective might help ease cross-platform tensions.

   See? We’re ALL just trying to figure out our machines after all!

2. [Dave Bullock (eecue)]

   FWIW I’ve been using OS X since it was in beta and I’ve never had crash reporter crash. I’m guessing this person was doing some funky programming and possibly trying to get crash reporter to die a horrid death.

   And to be fair, I don’t normally reboot my mac more than once every few weeks.

3. [Adam Fields]

   I think this Time Machine error is better.

4. [snej]

   Strictly speaking this isn’t part of the Mac OS — it’s a component of the iPhone driver software. (MobileDevice.framework is used by iTunes, and I think iPhoto, to talk to the iPhone.)

   And all a crash-reporter is, is a little app that gathers forensic info about a process that’s just crashed, and ask the user if it’s OK to send the info to the developer for debugging purposes. Nothing magic or system-critical about it. (Several 3rd party apps come with their own crash reporters.)

   /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/AppleMobileDeviceHelper.app/Contents/Resources/MDCrashReportTool

5. [Craigers!]

   I remember using OS 7-9 when you had to restart every 2-3 hours. I used to manage my departments computer lab in college. Everybody would start laughing at the start up boing cause we knew somebody had just crashed. OSX has its problems but I thank christ everyday for it. In fact I’ll thank him now. Thank you Jesus, thank you lord….

6. [hokano]

   So, the Lord Jesus has been busy working on OS X.

   That explains both how it got to be so awesome an OS and the increase in suffering in the world in recent years.

   Quite the tradeoff.

7. [WeightedCompanionCube]

   Windows has it too. I’ve seen Dr. Watson crash.

8. [WeightedCompanionCube]

   Craigers: sometimes OS 9 could be remarkably stable. I did work for this one place that had an ancient PowerMac that almost never needed a reboot… which was good, because if you did reboot it, the creaky old SCSI disk spun down and got stuck. You’d have to give it a really good kick to get the happy mac again.

9. [arikol]

   Yup, that’s an application crash, not an OS crash.
   If OS X and other apps are not affected then it shows hw stable the SYSTEM is.

   I use WinXP, MacOSX an Ubuntu. All have their strong and weak points. All are well maintained The XP box has run for 6 years with one system reinstall due to swapping system disks (decided a clean setup might be nice)
   OS X is better in most ways, especially stability and ease of use.
   Even Ubuntu is better than XP in very many ways (though NOT in installing new hardware) and is almost a contender.

   I also worked in repairs on Vista, which is why I still run XP.

   OS X FTW!

10. [ogvor]

    I love my Macbook Pro and OSX, but it isn’t error proof. I might get anywhere from 5-7 errors like that a month (though never anything where I have to reboot, like I used to all the time with windows). It often happens in Opera when I try to watch a Windows media file and the browser must convert it, but it still annoys me. And so far, I have one rally weird error where I couldn’t open Finder. I tried EVERYTHING, and after giving up and rebooting, everything went back to normal. Still, that sounds like what I had to deal with every week on my Windows, not every year on my mac (and I still haven’t ever gotten a virus, spyware/malware/ or had to defrag).

11. [Simon Greenwood]

    I haven’t seen that for about eight years, since I had 10.0 RC 1 running on a Quicksilver G4. In fact I didn’t think it existed in production OS X as it is a crash dump generator similar to Dr Watson in Windows. The more usual error is the ‘(Application) exited unexpectedly’ with options to Ignore or Relaunch and to send crash details to Apple.

12. [toxonix]

    The worst OS X crash I’ve ever had was with my Macbook G4. I’ve had it for a few years and recently it’s taken a shining to overheating. Anyway, any app thats running too hot crashes, which causes the crash reporter to run, which then crashes, and causes the crash reporter to run, which crashes, and starts up another instance of the crash reporter, which crashes, and causes.. you get the idea.

13. [heavyboots]

    Leopard still has some major oddities, imho. I’ve actually had the crashreporterd process hang, which causes no end of higgeldy-piggeldy, because the first time you crash an app the entire OS seizes while desperately trying to report the error to an unresponsive process.

    I think repairing permissions finally got me out of that (but this was back in the 10.3 days).

    OS 9- was as stable as the frontmost app, which was usually as stable as the font set you were running, lol… I still miss the Find dialog from System 7.6. I think that was the last time they got it nearly 100% right! (Current Spotlight-based search dialog is the werk of the devil, I tell you!)

14. [Anonymous]

    @Snej #4 – thanks for the path; ran “sudo chmod a-x” on that and no longer get that error message. Precludes my sending error reports to Apple, but if the tool was crashing anyway I doubt it makes much difference. =)