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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one. BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually…

I ran into this issue with the Sonoma update. My display (4k LG) was negotiating RGB just fine before, but not anymore. The BetterDisplay workaround hasn't worked for me. The poor colors and fuzzy edges around all the text is causing eye strain too. I'm beyond furious.

I used to use an EDID patcher written in Ruby but it stopped working on some version of macOS. Contained in that script is how it patches the EDID data which is what I got to work with BetterDisplay.

FWIW, here's the hacked script[0] which only keeps the EDID data patching part. Be warned it's very hacky with the base64 EDID to be patched hard-coded in line 8 of the script. It prints out the patched EDID base64 which should be entered back into BetterDisplay (which is also where you can get the unpatched base64 EDID).

[0] https://gist.github.com/karmakaze/f795171a6a795491e754c3d092...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#622

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default. You are not prompted or asked to enable. After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored. This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality.…

Set your Mac to English (UK) and Siri to English (US), or the other way around. Then it will complain that Apple Intelligence only works if Siri and your Mac have the same language.

Problem solved B-).

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#623

I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems: • I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room. • I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a…

That’s really weird, I have HomePods gen 1 & 2 (and a few mini’s) and they’ve worked fine so far. More often than not my room mates are more of a problem than the HomePods. Usually someone will connect their call to a random HomePod, which is usually pretty disconcerting.

I will say though I rarely ask the HomePods themselves to play music and almost always use a phone to start the music. I have ~7 connected around the house. I used a few different voices though so I know which one responded so I know which one to go after if I set a timer, since 3 share an open loft area and for that it can be a bit weird which one gets the request.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't think it's a culture thing or a CS fundamentals thing. I think it's the fact that software is 100x, or maybe even 1,000x, more complex that it was just 25 years ago. Apps are built on so many libraries and frameworks and packages that an average application will have 100x the amount of code. And they're all necessary . A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB. But it's not jus…

I agree. The frameworks and tools we use are so complicated, but we’re also so tied to the complexity that it’s pretty much an anti pattern to go outside the framework/toolkit. I haven’t fully thought this idea out, but I’ve been feelin it recently.

Left pad.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#626

My take: over success breeds complacency. Apple knows where its money is coming from. It has carved out an extremely hard to establish hardware production chain via iphone and macbooks, and is able to provide a certain consistent level of quality for it. Software is an afterthought, especially for software that is not in service of this primary hardware revenue source. From a business point of view it literally does…

I like this take. To add to that, it feels that for a company to maintain their software effectively, there needs to be a certain level of cross-departement knowledge, people who can connect the dots between frontend and backend for example, because usually it is in these transitions between two layers that bugs start to form. I feel like this becomes increasingly more difficult in large, complex company's where every departement is self-contained and there is not much vertical movement amongst colleagues, only horizontal. Which makes it really hard to solve issues that are not solely linked to one part of the process. So success doesn't only breed complacency, it decreases the possibility to do cross-departmental work because all the departments become to big to effectively facilitate this.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. This rings especially true with Windows. There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs. This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to exces…

Can you upload a video showing exactly what you mean by explorer is sluggish?

(not OP) I open the “videos” folder and it takes 10 seconds to show the files list (there’s only like 50 files). I tried various forum solutions (whose existence proves it’s a bug) and nothing worked. Only happens on the videos folder.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#628

In Apples position I would set up a little task force that goes through everything single bug mentioned in this thread and fixes it.

I would really love to hear how development at Apple is going nowadays. Fixing many of the things requires cross-team collaboration and I thought that was a no-go.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#629

I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been dele…

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#630

I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been dele…

[flagged]

This is true, but still smacks of victim-blaming.
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