Juha Saarinen: Apple OS X 10.10 a mixed bag

Apple has released an update to its Mac operating system. Photo / AP

Last week's launch of new gear from Apple shows that the company is pushing the envelope at least in some areas. OK, not the new iPads which were pretty much as expected but more the iMac with its high-resolution 5K Retina screen - am hoping to test drive that soon, in fact.

Going back to what's available now, one thing that I am very interested in is the new OS X 10.10 operating system, code-named Yosemite.

It's my daily work OS and anything that can make it better gets the thumbs up from me.

So far, OS X 10.10 is a bit of a mixed bag. I like the look of the new OS X, and even though it's an early version (Apple usually takes a few initial tries to get software right), it feels pretty fast and battery life on a Macbook Pro seems improved.

Not so good is the Chrome web browser, both 32 and 64-bit, having major problems with OS X 10.10. The Google browser runs but after a while, accumulates dead "Google Chrome Helper" processes that eat up memory and severely slow down the system.

You can kill them manually, but with many tabs open, there will be lots of Helper processes stuck so a reboot is faster.

Safari is more than an acceptable web browser workaround for the Chrome problem, of course.

I also noted that if apps use iCloud storage, either they or OS X 10.10 aren't clever enough not to try access it when there's no network connection. This became apparent while trying to start up Pages and watching the icon bounce up and down in the Dock for like five minutes.

Assuming we'll still use PCs for the next few years and Apple will continue to develop OS X 10.10 for them, there are some makeovers I'd like to see sooner rather than later.

Top of the list would be if Apple could prevent the operating system from gathering digital cruft and slowing down and becoming less stable as you install more and more applications and device drivers on it.

Windows does the same, and it's a pain. You should never have to reinstall an OS just to clear away the gunk.

Related, a file system that's self-healing and prevents "bit rot" which is small, subtle corruptions in digital files. Hard drives are already huge and you want important files like business records, family photos, music, videos and other data to remain intact. This is not guaranteed with most of today's file systems as anyone who's seen a half-loaded JPEG picture on the screen can attest to.

One feature that seems natural for the iMac 5K is "Deep Colour" and I'm curious if Apple has made any progress here in both software and hardware. Although angry internet commenters insist that the usual 8 bits of values per colour channel which provides approximately 16.7 million hues should be enough for everyone, it's not as simple as that.

Having 10, 12, 14 and 16 bit per colour channel makes a very noticeable difference with smooth gradations between hues instead of the blocky artefacts you see with 8-bit hardware and software.

Images and video look more natural and Deep Colour is the natural companion to very high resolution displays, especially for professional work but the feature's still rarely found despite first appearing decades ago.

As far as I can tell, there is only Deep Colour support in OS X 10.10 still, which is surprising given that Apple's focus on video and photo editing. If so, that's rather a shame.

Broadband everywhere but no connection

As I've belatedly discovered, Tokyo's an amazing city to visit. Despite something like 37.8 million people in the densely populated Greater Tokyo area, the city is super well organised and with cars mostly kept out of residential areas, and it's fantastic for walking around and exploring.

Food's good, people friendly, but getting mobile broadband so that you can use Apple/Google Maps so you don't get lost? Ah now... that's complicated. This in a country with lots of fibre to the home connections, LTE 4G broadband and even WiMAX wireless.

Roaming with an NZ SIM in Japan for any greater length of time is too expensive: voice calls cost $3 per minute to make and $1 per minute to receive; SMS texts are $0.80 each on Vodafone.

Data likewise is pricey on roaming: $15, $30 and $50 for 40, 100 and 200 megabytes respectively. Ouch.

How about getting a pre-paid SIM in Japan then? That used to be impossible apparently as the law demands that you show identification to register for the SIM. The acceptable ID was an Alien Resident's Card which of course no tourist will have.

It's meant to be possible these days as the Japanese ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has made it clear that foreigners can show passports as ID when buying SIMs.

Whether or not you'll succeed in buying a SIM depends on if ministry's decree has filtered down to the telcos or not. None of the ones I contacted were willing to provide a SIM with both data and voice.

I could have one or the other, but to get a voice/data SIM, I'd have to "rent" one with a low amount of data and not a great deal of voice minutes. Also, if you want fast LTE 4G as opposed to the more pedestrian 3G, the data cap's even lower and some telcos restrict traffic after x amount of megabytes a day and block YouTube clips, etc.

As you don't have to return the "rented" SIM, it seems the main purpose of the restriction is to make sure that foreigners suffer the same amount of complexity the Japanese have to put up with for mobile communications.

Yes, Japan's one country that still permits SIM-locking, but the government is finally looking at removing that anti-competitive hurdle that prevents customers from shifting from one provider to another.

Free Wi-Fi is rare in Japan too, adding insult to injury. I gave up on finding a SIM and rented a "pocket Wi-Fi" adapter from a company called Global Access Communications (GAC) which costs $11.50 a day (discounts for longer periods are available) and has a maximum data allowance of 10 gigabytes a month.

This buys a small white Mi-Fi 802.11n router with a battery that you carry with you and connect your smartphone or whatever device to. The Pocket Wi-Fi router in turn connects to a mobile network and there's your internet access kludge up and running.

GAC was easy and polite to deal with and sent the router to where I was staying - you get a prepaid envelope to stuff the router in at the end of rental period, via the Japanese postal service.

The long and short of the Pocket Wi-Fi story is that it works OK. GAC uses Emobile as its network and in Tokyo coverage was good with four bars most of the time.

Emobile's network is supposed to provide up to 75Mbps downloads according to GAC, but the real speed turned out to be rather a lot less, at 3Mbps down and below 2Mbps up at the first location I was at. This improved greatly to 17/10Mbps further out west in Tokyo however. Both locations showed four bars of LTE signal so I guess one cellular site was overloaded.

Latency was good at 40ms approximately, and as long as you're in good coverage, the Pocket Wi-Fi is an acceptable solution for temporary broadband access in Japan.

Here's hoping the Japanese government sees sense soon and fixes the mobile broadband bureaucracy because it's not a good look for an advanced country.