Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?

I've tried to "go mac" about 3 times now, at quite a bit of expense, and the horrible and endless well of failure that is Finder continues to rebuff me. Even as Explorer continues to change and ends up with some weird corners, it's such a much better and more efficient file manager.

I'll find myself going weeks, enjoying my rMBP, then I'll need to do some heavy duty file management and end up in Finder-hell and immediately wish I was using something better. DirectoryOpus, Midnight Commander, anything.

It says something when the CLI is not only faster to use, but more user-friendly and discoverable than the GUI.

In fact, I'm about to start work on a bunch of file management and I've been putting it off for a week just because I don't want to interact with Finder.

Gahhh, it's a terrible terrible piece of software.

(maybe I should just break down and install this http://www.ragesw.com/products/explorer.html)

I own 2 separate apple PCs. And seriously considering replacing one of them (Mac Mini) with Mac Pro ($3000 starting price !!) for video work. And probably getting another mac laptop for wife.

I got on the apple fan train kinda late, like right around when they transitioned to Intel.

With that said, I sometimes feel Apple hitting it big with iPhones was similar to someone winning a lottery. Often when someone wins jackpot, he grows distant from friends/family because of his money. He loses his direction in life due to the sudden infusion of wealth.

I feel that way with Apple.

> when I read Siracusa's review

Are you referring to his Yosemite review? Is it out yet?

This comments section has lots of people saying "x was when things got really bad" followed by people saying "actually x was the pinnacle." (And some then following up with "it was actually y when it got bad.")

This has been the pattern in The Comments since I started using Apple stuff 15 years ago. Likewise, "Apple used to innovate and now they're out of ideas."

Which isn't to say that things haven't perhaps taken a downturn lately: there have unquestionably been an unusually large number of publicized missteps in the last couple of months. Some technical, some social, some real, and some media-hyped. But an apparent clustering at one moment doesn't assure or even imply a long-term trend. Five and ten years from now I feel confident the same comments will be being made.

People get annoyed at the un-Steve-like-ness of Cook's apparent focus on quantifiable things like "CustSat". But, when you're serving literally hundreds of millions of customers in a blog-driven media world, it's hard to know what would be a better way to measure these things. If customers are becoming less satisfied, you can be certain the executive team knows it.

Still, it seems apparent that there's an immediate PR issue. (And simultaneously, it should be noted, iPhones are flying off the shelves in unprecedented numbers and at likely higher ASPs than ever.) If I were Cook, I'd do what I could to make really sure we got our act together in the short term, look for some opportunities to buy back some goodwill, and then I'd probably keep doing roughly what we'd been doing for the last decade or so while weighing the feasibility of some of the commmon suggestions, such as decoupling OS releases from hardware releases.

>Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?

No, blogs and articles are experiencing a problematic decline in long and medium term memory.

Apple has always (under Jobs or not) had ups and downs, in both software and hardware quality control.

Remember how OS X 10.1 was unusable, the problems with Lion, when it first came out? The file-loss bug in the FS? And tons of other things besides.

As for hardware, well, Jobs first love child was the cube, with the overheating problem (and the not-selling-well problem). Then we had the iBook G3 logic board issues (for tons of models). Battery issues. The G5 Pro cooling goo leak issue. Etc etc. And of course, as any long time Mac buyer knows, a classic advice is "never buy the first revision of a product".

Part of it, for hardware, is that a bug in a production run e.g. for Dell doesn't affect that many people (because Dell puts out 50+ different models, whereas Apple puts out a few, so each of Apple's has tens of millions of buyers). And of course the press doesn't care much for a fault in Dell or HP or whatever production run, whereas the slightest BS in an Apple production run is a "*gate". And of course Apple does more daring stuff with machining, weight, thinness, internal design etc than most companies, so there's always a chance to screw some things that's bigger than in just assembling some brick-sized plasticy laptop.