Apple’s declining software quality

It feels a little clichéd to say it, but I do feel that Snow Leopard, outdated now as it is, was some kind of fortuitous confluence of factors that resulted in OS X being as close to perfect as it's ever been.

Even putting aside the iOS-style elements being added, my experience has been that each version of OS X has been slightly worse than the last, and tends to introduce strange little anomalies and instabilities on hardware that was otherwise working just fine. Sometimes these issues are fixed in the next major version, but sometimes they aren't; and even when they are fixed, there are an equal number of new issues introduced.

My perspective is perhaps coloured by having switched to the Mac during the Tiger era, which was about equal with Snow Leopard in terms of stability and 'completeness'. Since then, with the exception of Snow Leopard, it's been downhill. (I realise, of course, that Tiger benefitted from 11 point updates and thus more polish than any version before or since, but the point stands.)

Any sufficiently advanced product management problem is indistinguishable from a software quality problem.

I agree. I won't write a list of the problems in detail, but I've been a Mac user since the 80's because I've always preferred Apple's elegant design and ease of use. But lately, it's hard to figure out how to do things, and it's very buggy. Both I and my son have had to reset our phones to fix problems. It looks like my wife will have to reset hers to deal with a problem with music synchronization.

And the design as way harder to master than it should be. For instance, to search for a track in Apple Music, you have to be in any tab except iTunes Store. OK, there's some logic to it, but it simply is not intuitive. Why can't there be something that specifically says "Apple Music" that makes it obvious that that's where you go to find tracks? I'm an experienced computer user, and in fact a software developer, and when I first purchased Apple Music I was mystified about how to search for a track in Apple Music. I had to Google it. My wife, who isn't used to Googling for these kinds of answers and isn't a technologist, has no choice but to ask me or the kids how to do things like that.

In the Music app iOS, to make it show only the tracks you've downloaded, you have to click on the pulldown where you select Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. It's a switch on the bottom of that pulldown. When you're thinking "What tracks do I have downloaded?" this is just not obvious. When you get used to it, it's fine. But if you're a naive user, you really have to have a friend who's an experienced user just in order to figure out how to do such basic things. Naive users may not even understand that the Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. pulldown is a menu. And even if they know it is a menu, it's not intuitive to think that there's an on-off switch for showing all songs at the bottom of it, which relates a fundamentally different concept.

It all just seems like really poor design. I don't know what their problem is. But my son, who has always been an Apple user because I've been one, and who is applying to colleges like MIT to do engineering, is seriously considering switching to Android so that he doesn't have to deal with so many bugs. (Not that I know that Android is better.)

The punchline that "it just works" is not lost in time. Lot of Apple designed software are more like talking points when they release iPhone or do a big media event.

Mac OS as lot of Apps which need update, Photos -- was more of an attempt to catch up with Picasa Similarly notes and icloud as well need updates. It feels like Apple just wants to through sometime out since they are trying to catch up with others in the market and once that is done, you have to wait another year just to get an update. Software development and updates should be iterative and not based on media events.

I didn't suspect so much traffic, we're back up now :)