Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#31

Post by ewillbefull » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

I haven't used Apple software in a long time, but Google is not immune to this either apparently. If you use the YouTube app, and especially if you use Chromecast, you'll experience countless bugs as it fails to reconcile state changes between the devices or properly buffer videos. I'm considering setting up a raspi or something and installing an ad blocker on it to replace my Chromecast. I don't think this is what Google wants but its product is difficult to use any other way.

Hangouts / Google Calendar are also really clunky and seem poorly tested. Things often go out of sync or you're randomly asked to re-login several times a month, and only during video chats.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#32

Post by irq » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

ghrifter wrote: post #12

Two apps I use the most on my iPhone are Podcasts and Music. On my PC (windows) I use iTunes often. Both the iPhone apps and the modern version of iTunes are an utter, over-designed mess. It felt like the core programming functionality was there, until some UX designer got a hold of the front end of those apps and decided to fubar it beyond recognition. There is _Literally_ no way to just look at all music on your iP…

This just isn't true. You can easily browse your songs on an iPhone in the Music app by album, artist, song, genre, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe you're not familiar with the UI?

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#33

Post by marssaxman » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

27182818284 wrote: post #9

I've been using OS X since just Leopard, but I've noticed a decline as well. I'm not excited for new releases anymore. For example, I haven't moved to El Capitan. By contrast, I couldn't wait for Snow Leopard--I was really excited to use it.

Snow Leopard was the peak, in my experience; like you, I felt like each new version of OS X through 10.6.8 came as an improvement. Since then, I greet each new release with a sigh - "okay, let's find out what previously straightforward process they've decided to complicate with a bunch of fancy animations this time".

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#34

Post by yggydrasily » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

The problem is that Steve Jobs isn't around any more to give the company the proper focus and hold everyone to a high quality standard.

The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse.

Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again.

This time, there may be no coming back.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#35

Post by drhayes9 » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

sithadmin wrote: post #19

>Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs. As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I pur…

Do you have any recommendations for a music player that isn't iTunes?

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#36

Post by dasil003 » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

My take on this is not that Apple has gotten worse, but that they have actually gotten better at cloud services. Whereas no one actually used MobileMe or iDisk, their new generation of cloud services is actually being used. It's true that they're losing ground because Google has defined a bar for cloud services that they can't reach, but they are trying and not entirely failing at it.

The secondary aspect is the surface area of what they are dealing with. This is a far cry from the old Mac OS days where they were really a PC company. Now they have to make OS X, iOS (for both phones/tablets), and tvOS all work together seamlessly. If quality was exactly the same, they would have far more bugs just based on the cartesian complexity of possible interactions.

I hope they can sort it out because I'm feeling the pain just like everyone else, but I don't see any better alternatives at the moment.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#37

Post by givinguflac » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

gburt wrote: post #17

givinguflac wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you, when your current Mac is older and relegated to media PC duty, are you going to need more than the 8 or 16GB of RAM it shipped with? As for batteries, it's almost the exact same price to buy a battery a replace it yourself as it is to have Apple do it, and you don't have to deal with proper recycling (hopefully you would.) I'm hoping we see a reverse trend but who knows.

If and only if you live near an Apple store. Otherwise you might be without your machine for a week or two during that period: that is a serious cost for many people in our profession.

That's certainly a valid concern; I have never been in that situation so yeah that could be trouble. Aren't there typically local repair centers that do authorized repairs? If not that's a huge oversight even if they only allowed battery swaps. That said, I have a 2006 MBP that is ancient and still works when wired to power even though I can replace the battery it works fine as an email/web browsing headless with a monitor.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#38

Post by untog » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

I don't much care about the software - I haven't used iTunes in years, don't use Mail, etc. etc. - it's the operating system I care about.

Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employees crazy. Yet, nothing gets done.

If I were in the market for a new laptop right now I'd be taking a serious look at a Surface Book - it's the first thing I've seen that looks like it could rival a Macbook in the hardware department. Sadly, I'd have to do a lot more research into getting a decent POSIX environment set up on it before I could take the plunge.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#39

Post by runjake » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

aditya wrote: post #20

Wow, that's a lot of media hoopla. Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware. Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a whi…

"Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware."

If you swapped all occurrences of "hardware" and "software" in the above statement with each other, you'd have what people said about Apple in the 1990s.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#40

Post by Gys » Mon, Feb 08, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

Since I updated to 10.11.3 (a few days ago) my Air crashes about once a day. It used to be once in a while and in the past months about once in a week.

iTunes give we some weird null error if I switch accounts. Since a few weeks I think (do not use it often, only for updates).

My iphone 6 often refuses to show the 'copy'-popup the first time I select something. So I regularly have to selected something again, just to get the popup. This used to work the first time.

Just some examples that come to mind.