As Apple reportedly continues to test the first maintenance update for OS X El Capitan, a small number of glitches have shown up. I know of two on recent iMacs, and I realize such a tiny sampling of similarly configured hardware isn’t sufficient to reveal a trend. But I’ll tell you what I’ve seen and what I’ve discovered as we wait for the expected arrival of 10.11.1, and I’m curious to see what readers have discovered.

It’s almost a given that there will be mail glitches. I have large IMAP folders spanning several accounts, and I wasn’t surprised that I’d see something this time. It might be the result of some sort of background message processing, for every so often, when I click on a message folder, such as an Inbox, nothing happens. It seems as if the app has frozen solid, but after a few seconds, it’s working again.

That’s just a minor annoyance. When I examined some of the online chatter on Mail in El Capitan, I found reports of people who aren’t receiving messages at all since the upgrade. I’ve seen nothing that drastic, and it’s possible problems of that sort are limited to specific email services, or a small number of installations. I suppose we’ll see.

The other problem is, to me, more significant, and I’ve seen it on a couple of recent iMacs, both using external USB speakers, such as Bose. In each case, the sound suddenly disappears. Gone, kaput! Changing output settings to Internal Speakers and back again, to Bose USB Audio, has no effect. The only solution, temporary though it is, involves a restart.

What is most troubling is when it happens during an interview for one of my radio shows. Guests may not appreciate being forced to hang out for a few minutes while a restart is in progress, and, of course, it shouldn’t happen — ever. I’m assuming, for the moment, that there’s no hardware issue, because the sound was flawless with OS X Yosemite. What’s more, I do find evidence that others have encountered sound issues of one sort or another after installing El Capitan.

Meantime, I’ve experimented with a pair of remedies. One is to restart in Safe Mode, with the Shift key held down.

Officially, here’s what Safe Mode does:

• Verifies your startup disk, and attempts to repair directory issues if needed
• Loads only required kernel extensions
• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically
• Disables user-installed fonts
• Deletes font caches, Kernel cache and other system cache files

This is a fairly normal diagnostic step. Another is to reset NVRAM on a Mac. This is the modern-day equivalent of reseting the PRAM on older Macs, and it’s done the same way. Among the information stored in nonvolatile memory is speaker volume, so there might be a connection.

To reset NVRAM, follow these steps (direct from Apple’s support document on the subject):

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (?), Option, P, and R.
3. Turn on your Mac.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys immediately after you hear the startup sound.
5. Hold these keys until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for a second time.
6. Release the keys.

Evidently shutting down is an important part of the process. A restart isn’t sufficient to get the job done. It’s also possible that you’ll have to reset the time, startup disk, screen resolution and time zone. Or maybe not. For me, it’s usually just the startup disk.

All told, something in these two painless remedies might be just what’s needed, and I tried them both before writing this column. But the problem has been sufficiently erratic, happening every few hours or every few days, that I haven’t been able to test the efficacy of any remedy.

These steps are also sometimes useful in fixing network-related issues, such as erratic Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The former was reported by many in OS X Yosemite before Apple finally found a fix, reverting to an older networking file, in 10.10.4.

There’s another diagnostic tool that used to be available for OS X, and that was to repair disk permissions. The process, activated in Disk Utility or a third-party maintenance app, generally focused on system files, and the repair would sometimes fix odd behavior. But El Capitan’s “System Integrity Protection,” designed to prevent access to certain system files to provide greater security, has ended the need for this function. That’s why it’s no longer present in Disk Utility.

Besides, I rather suspect that repairing disk permissions really helped very few people, and was the sort of process that may have provided some emotional security but little more. I’ve used it over the years, mostly because it was there, and even suggested it to clients. But I do not recall any episode where it actually fixed anything. I do recall a few occasions where I had to manually change the permissions on a file to make it work, but that is the extent of it.

Nonetheless, it is encouraging to see that the list of early bugs in El Capitan doesn’t seem as large as Yosemite, so that’s progress.

I was surprised to learn that most auto makers use their own facilities, or hired hands, to test for emissions and fuel economy. So it’s not that America’s EPA will necessarily come on over to a factory, test equipment in hand, to perform a direct inspection unless there was the need to do so. It’s not the same as a restaurant being visited by the health department to make sure the facilities are clean and there are no creepy crawly things running loose.

So this was a disaster waiting to happen, and when Volkswagen apparently tried to make excuses when confronted with evidence that many recent vehicles with diesel engines emitted too much of the foul stuff, they were forced to come clean. So hundreds of thousands of cars sold between 2009 and 2015 in the U.S. are subject to recalls to install a fix. VW admits that over 11 million vehicles around the world suffer from the same problem.

The source? Well, evidently VW installed software on these vehicles that disabled certain emission controls under normal use, but when they were being checked for emissions, the controls were switched on. The mind boggles over excuses from departing corporate executives that they didn’t know that millions of their vehicles were being hacked in this way to pass air pollution regulations around the world.

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Let’s put things in perspective first: Migration from iOS 8 to iOS 9 is off the charts. As this article was written, Mixpanel Trends had it at over 55% and growing just 15 days after it was released. It helps that Apple has made it as easy as possible to upgrade by supporting the same hardware as iOS 8. In addition, the iOS 9 installation requires far less free storage than its predecessor, so the bottlenecks afflicting the previous version have mostly been eliminated.

On Wednesday, Apple released OS X El Capitan, free and supporting the same Macs as the two previous versions. While it’s too early to know how popular it’ll be, the early buzz is promising. It’s not about the wealth of compelling new features, but adding spit and polish that will make for a satisfactory upgrade for most of you.

But that takes us to the other side of the OS universe, Microsoft. On July 29th, Microsoft released Windows 10 as a free upgrade for people using Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Indeed, to the chagrin of some, Microsoft even pushed installer files in the background to many PCs, so users could begin a fairly quick installation as soon as they were ready. Of course you wonder about the morality of a stunt of that sort. While it may be true that these people already reserved their free upgrade, grabbing ahold of several gigabytes of free space on someone’s PC without their permission doesn’t sound terribly nice, and how does it show respect for their privacy?

I’m also concerned that there aren’t more complaints about this stunt. One article I read about the migration rate merely mentioned the fact of unwanted downloads in passing. Have we really fallen that far when it comes to privacy concerns?

But considering how simple it is to get a copy, just how well is Windows 10 doing? Well, it certainly started out well. In August, after a month’s availability, NetMarketShare reported that the migration rate went from 0.39 percent — consisting of beta testers — to 5.21 percent. That was sufficient to exceed the current share of Windows 8. Microsoft boasted of 75 million downloads. Everything was coming up roses.

Except that the shine appears to be fading. The web metrics for September indicate that Windows 10’s share only climbed another 1.42 percent. Not so good. While such stats aren’t necessarily perfect, there are some curious developments. So the share of Windows 8 increased from 2.56 percent to 2.60 percent, but Windows 8.1 fell by 0.67 percentage points. This may have, in part, been the result of statistical noise.

Regardless, the slowing migration rate doesn’t seem to bode well for Windows 10 now that the early adopters have upgraded. However, it is still expected that Windows 10 will slide past Windows 8.x by January, but perhaps just barely.

Windows 7’s share dropped 1.14 percentage points to 56.53%. Curiously, Windows XP diehards aren’t going anywhere. The share increased a tad in September from 12.14 percent to 12.21 percent. Indeed, I still run into businesses that are stuck on Windows XP, and I’ve grown too exhausted to question them as to why. I expect that the numbers won’t change significantly for years, despite issues of compatibility and security. Or maybe Windows XP users are not the major targets for malware authors that they used to be.

What’s most troubling, however, is the fact that Microsoft, as usual, still cannot devise an ad campaign that conveys the real value of Windows 10. Evidently they have watched just too many Apple ads focusing on lifestyle and have browbeaten the ad agencies to conform. I cannot imagine how this is the best way to promote Windows 10. Hint: It’s not about watching kids draw annotations on a web page in the Edge browser on a convertible PC. That’s not Microsoft’s target audience.

Indeed, just showing a decent-looking operating system with a fully functioning Start menu may actually be enough to entice people who ignored Windows 8.x like the plague to upgrade. The fact that it’s free for many users surely helps. It also helps that its best features are the ones that take it closer in concept to Windows 7. Had Microsoft gone direct to what became Windows 10 — without the Windows 8 detour — things might have gone much better.

Yes, there’s a story to tell here about a solid operating system that has a decent mix of features and is solace for anyone who got stuck with Windows 8.x. But Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand how to get the message across, and there’s no foolishly warm and fuzzy solution.

Even assuming the worst of the early bugs have been eradicated in all the updates that followed the release of Windows 10, that doesn’t mean businesses will be flocking to install it. There are still matters of compatibility with existing apps and hardware, and whether businesses, most of whom stuck with Windows 7, will find it worth the bother to upgrade. It may take a couple of years for a meaningful migration and, considering all those Windows XP holdouts, maybe it won’t be significant.

I mean is there anything really wrong with Windows 7 that makes Windows 10 an essential upgrade for the enterprise? That’s a question Microsoft will have to answer, and the promise of Universal apps and identical operating systems for mobile and desktop doesn’t seem enough to sway large numbers of Windows users.

I am writing this post only a few hours after installing the iOS 9.0.2 update on my iPhones and Barbara’s iPad. Nothing untoward has occurred so far. For some it ends there after you undergo a roughly 15 or 30 minute download and installation process.

Last week’s iOS 9.0.1 update had a handful of fixes that included a “slide to unlock” bug that froze the upgrade process. You couldn’t get past it to finish setting up iOS 9, and you actually had to restore your gadget to get it running again.

But I’m not at all sure how widespread the problem turned out to be. It didn’t get near the bad publicity of last year’s iOS 8.0.1 update the essentially bricked about 40,000 new iPhones. That update was pulled within an hour, and a fixed 8.0.2 arrived the very next day. The affected phones could restored without difficulty. But Apple never lived it down, and some pundits want to pretend it was far worse than it seemed.

At least saner minds prevailed this time.

With 9.0.2 arrived a handful of new fixes. They included:

• Fixes an issue with the setting to turn on or off app cellular data usage
• Resolves an issue that prevented iMessage activation for some users
• Resolves an issue where an iCloud backup could be interrupted after starting a manual backup
• Fixes an issue where the screen could incorrectly rotate when receiving notifications
• Improves the stability of Podcasts

There are evidently some security fixes as well, and the key issue is this one:

Lock Screen

Available for: iPhone 4s and later, iPod touch (5th generation) and later, iPad 2 and laterImpact: A person with physical access to an iOS device may be able to access photos and contacts from the lock screen

Description: A lock screen issue allowed access to photos and contacts on a locked device. This issue was addressed by restricting options offered on a locked device.

CVE-ID

CVE-2015-5923

That does sound serious. In addition, some times are no doubt going unmentioned, and that’s nothing at all new for Apple. With the previous release, I noticed that one app that constantly crashed no longer crashed. I retested that app and a few others, just to be sure nothing has gone astray. So far I see no evidence of anything untoward.

But I do wish Apple would be more revealing about such matters. There are always more bugs than are revealed in these release notes, and you have to keep your fingers crossed that the ones you know about have been fixed.

While I can see where Apple might want to simplify release notes for regular users, what about developers who might need to know all the details to make sure there are no problems with their apps, or at least that those problems are being considered? There are too many things that remain uncertain in the way Apple delivers information about software updates, and I do wish they’d be more forthcoming. At least the updates are coming fast, and perhaps things will stabilize now ahead of the release of iOS 9.1, which has already entered the beta three stage according to published reports.

But since the most important feature of 9.1 appears to be more Emoji options, I haven’t bothered. That’s really not on my radar. According to published reports, that update may be designed mainly to support the iPad Pro, which means it won’t arrive until November. If I hear of any other important changes, I might try out the beta, but not yet.

Regardless, it does appear that the adoption rate for iOS 9 is off the charts. Two weeks after release, Mixpanel Trends is showing that over 54% of iOS users are running it. Apple’s stats, showing a 52% adoption rate, goes back to September 19th, and that is mighty peculiar. You’d think it would have been updated by now, unless that original number represented some sort of anomaly, and it eventually settled down to a lower number. But I’m not going to suggest a conspiracy theory, since the number might be updated at any time. It’s just that Apple’s OS migration stats tend to lag behind third parties.

That’s what happened with iOS 8, and while it ended up with an adoption rate of over 85%, better than I expected, it was still perceived as far less popular than iOS 7. Don’t forget the early problems with upgrades, because the installation required more space that was available on many iPhones and iPads. Apple has addressed that with iOS 9, where the upgrade requires less than one-third the space for installation. And if you still don’t have enough space, the installer will offer to temporarily remove some apps and, when the installation is over, it will restore them and the data associated with those apps. That’s as seamless as it gets.

One key issue that’s still present involves App Thinning, an iOS 9 feature that with the potential to really save space on your gear. The Slicing feature will restrict the apps you install to the versions that work on your device rather than the full contents of a universal app. But Apple pulled the feature because of an iCloud issue, although this week’s Xcode fix may, in part, have addressed that problem. We’ll have to see.

The next adoption rate of significance will be OS X El Capitan. It arrived on schedule on September 30, and there are already reports that the first maintenance update, 10.11.1, is being tested by developers and those who signed up with Apple’s public beta program. I haven’t seen a list of fixes or changes yet.