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It Just Works

danielandrews.com

61–70 of 192 posts

Re: It Just Works

#61
post #53

I got into Apple in 2006, loved the ride up to Snow Leopard. Then things got weird. UI choices that made little sense. Hardware bugs that were impossible to diagnose or fix. Like my parents Mac Mini that would show snow on the display after it went to sleep. Try troubleshooting that remotely. My work rMBP has some similar issues where my monitor just goes green. And then it also has a SystemUI freeze for upwards of 3…

I am a HUGE Apple Hater so take this as it be. I have always had issues with stability with Apple's OS. Everyone else always said I was crazy but I have dozens of people see me repeat the crash over and over again doing simple one or two step processes. Start with Apple OS 7 up to just yesterday when Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color.

> Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color.

You can probably blame Adobe for that. In their infinite wisdom they implemented their own window management system for their products on OS X.

Re: It Just Works

#62

Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW, I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box (without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep suggested that it's out of stock. So,…

Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?

I purchased a system 76 Gazelle laptop, and it's a pretty reliable . Wifi, audio and dual monitors worked out of the box, but it has trouble with 3 monitors(includes laptop screen) My main complaint is the battery life.(This is probably a linux issue) At best I get 2.5 hours, which needs serious improvements.

However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the disaster of desktop linux,

Re: It Just Works

#63

It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue another reboot of the iPhone. My iMac. U…

[deleted]

Re: It Just Works

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissing bug reports because "it works on my machine" is also a kind of dangerous extrapolation, especially with the near-certainty that any large piece of software has bugs.

Not dismissing anything, just pointing out that the author's standard of evidence is somewhat lacking.

You don't have to look far for the evidence. For any issue you can normally find several huge forum posts on the apple support forums (with no helpful responses from Apple).

Re: It Just Works

#66
post #50

It's certainly the case that OSX, at least, has gotten flaky as heck, but at the same time: What's the competition? While Apple was releasing Yosemite, Microsoft was going down the Windows 8 rabbit-hole, releasing the worst version of Windows since ME. And while desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would say that it "Just Works" yet. The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just…

Windows 8 has been solid (Except people don't like the GUI) Windows 10 gives you the start button back (I don't like start buttons) Linux - There really are good use cases for Linux. Your's might fit this one. Works for me and I dual boot for the odd time I need another OS (About twice a quarter) Chromebook - Limited to "normal" users workflow cases.

The whole Metro UI stunt was a mistake, It should never have happened. I'm really curious about who's to blame for that stuff, I don't think it's Sinofsky, because it's just so stupid. But at the same time there is very little difference between 7 and 8 so why would anyone want to buy yet another license ? That's the problem right here with Windows. Worse it looks like they removed some features from 7 to 10. Aside from gamers who always need yet another version of directx frankly it becomes harder and harder to justify the cost of Windows for each new computer bought.

Re: It Just Works

#67

It's certainly the case that OSX, at least, has gotten flaky as heck, but at the same time: What's the competition? While Apple was releasing Yosemite, Microsoft was going down the Windows 8 rabbit-hole, releasing the worst version of Windows since ME. And while desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would say that it "Just Works" yet. The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just…

And while desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would say that it "Just Works" yet.

The true test for a system isn't so much whether it "just works" -- the closest you'll ever get will be "mostly works" especially as you dive deeper into the rabbit hole, but rather how observable and debuggable it is once the inevitable "doesn't work" moment appears.

Because, for all purposes, GNU/Linux reached the average user threshold a long time ago. The majority of complaints boil down to hardware support, but this is the survival bias in action -- you're totally ignoring the hoops the OEM had to go through to run Windows, and that trying to install Windows images on heterogenous hardware won't fare that much better. Some complain of installation failures, and I think this is a result of ignorance from people using all those convenient liveCD/USB makers like UNetbootin which actually overwrite the bootloader configuration and thus may break lots of images.

Re: It Just Works

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loss of focus and feature creep. They've became an engineering company (as opposed to an "appliances" company, I guess). This, of course, IMO.

> Loss of focus and feature creep My point is though that I've heard this sentiment from Google customers, Microsoft customers etc. In fact to me it seems that I can only think of a few examples of software that seems to consistently improve in people's opinions. Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software as an industry? Is there a reporting bias? It's probably a combination of bot…

>Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software as an industry?

I would argue that this is indeed the case. The need to continue upping that version number results in the inevitable bloat and cruft. Nobody is interested in putting out a maintenance release, and quite frankly, if a company released a major software update without new features we would collectively deride them for it. (Don't talk to me about Snow Leopard, even though they talked up the maintenance aspect of it they still promoted at on of new features.)

Re: It Just Works

#69
post #43

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to th…

I totally agree with you on Photos. Everything about it is overly complicated. It should be a simple as take photo, it's on my phone, automatically added to my computer and in the cloud. Edit/delete anywhere. At least they got rid of the Camera Roll. If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop photos from my phone through Finder. No application needed. I miss the old iPod Classic and i…

"If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop..."

This may sound petty, but this is the biggest reason I don't use an iPhone. Smartphones are more than consumption devices. They are tiny computers and I want the flexibility of using a tiny computer.

Re: It Just Works

#70

It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue another reboot of the iPhone. My iMac. U…

The frequent Yosemite beachballs seem to only occur on systems with old-school hard drives. It's nowhere near as bad on SSD systems. It's crazy frustrating on my iMac, but my macbook pro is fine.

So I suspect the changes and additional daemons in Yosemite added a bunch of disk I/O, and the engineers never noticed because they're all on SSD systems.

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