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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#101

Post by drzaiusapelord »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #70

It is not fair to single out Apple - all the software has gone downhill in the past couple of years - browsers, websites, apps, appliances, virtually everything. My suspicion is that it's the proliferation of new ways of doing things - new languages, no-sql/key-value db's, new hosting platforms such as AWS, docker, big data stuff like hadoop, storm and spark, all kinds of embedded software (tv's, cars), etc - we've g…

This is my take as well. Complexity and the speed we get there has reached an all time high.

You can't be fast moving and have high quality. Software is like any other trade: polish takes time and you need to stop to polish things. This thread has a lot of people praising Snow Leopard. Frankly, the difference between Leopard and SL aren't the high, but that's two years of development at Apple to polish things up. Apple had a rare slow moving period to clean things up.

I suspect the mobile/cloud/whatever revolution is only recently slowing down and we'll be entering a polish period again soon. Then we'll be entering a complexity building period sometime after. Its a cycle that keeps repeating itself.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#102

Post by chaostheory »

mrweasel wrote: post #95
chaostheory wrote: post #78

To be fair, Apple seems to be addressing this with the last release. El Capitan had fewer new features and concentrated mainly on performance issues. I hope they do the same in the next release. I don't care for more features at this point.

>El Capitan had fewer new features and concentrated mainly on performance issues. Well if that was their goal I think they failed. I skipped Yosemite, so I'm comparing to Mavericks. El Capitan feels much slower, I don't think I ever seen the beach ball so often.

weird, it felt faster than Mavericks to me. I'm pretty sure that Mavericks eats up more RAM than El Capitan but then again I could be wrong.

Still, having Apple acknowledging the problem is a win. I've tried migrating to Ubuntu and Windows 10. Didn't work. If I could justify a new Mac Pro, it would probably mitigate the problem. I just wish they had a Mac Pro lite. I don't want yet another converted laptop e.g. mini & imac

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#103

Post by qubitcoder »

sdegutis wrote: post #6
Grue3 wrote: post #4

Um, Quicktime? iTunes? Apple's software was always terrible (as a Windows user).

QuickTime was always way ahead of the game in terms of playing videos with a fantastic user interface. They kept innovating the UI so that it would get out of your way while still letting you do the basic things people need to do to watch a video. Even today I feel like QT is one of Apple's non-failures. The only thing I don't like about it is that you can't easily rewind a few seconds backwards. It requires a really…

QuickTime on OSX has a nice feature to quickly move forwards and backwards when watching a video--just swipe horizontally with two fingers to the left or right. It's a little flaky at times, but works for the most part.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#104

Post by timdeneau »

wlesieutre wrote: post #37
koralatov wrote: post #12

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 o…

One wonders if the yearly release schedule has something to do with this. It's got to be a constant rush to tick off the new feature boxes, and then we don't get the period of bug fixing and stability before the engineers all rush off to start implementing next year's new additions. For a long time it was effectively on a two year clock; they had releases in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011. Now it's half that.

I also think this is the root problem.

The thing is, we don't need a new OS every year, and most people I know don't want to update their devices either.

Where is the demand coming from?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#105

Post by xeromal »

jonknee wrote: post #59
dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

A lot of awful software shipped under Steve Jobs. X Code has always been a buggy mess, iTunes bloated greatly under Steve (remember Ping?), iMovie '08, etc etc.

Totally forgot about Ping. I love being reminded of old "features".

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#106

Post by jpeterson »

jonknee wrote: post #59
dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

A lot of awful software shipped under Steve Jobs. X Code has always been a buggy mess, iTunes bloated greatly under Steve (remember Ping?), iMovie '08, etc etc.

Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#107

Post by lubonay »

bsbechtel wrote: post #98
dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

>>Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with. I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.

I can't upvote this enough. So many products have been ruined by feature creep, it's sad to even think about it...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#108

Post by MicroBerto »

The sentiment in this thread rings true to me. Usually the techies (ie HN readers/commenters) are ahead of the curve, so it will only be so much time before the cries from the general populace become louder.

Meanwhile, last time I was on an airplane (December), every single older woman over the age of 60 had an iPhone. This means that it's not only reached critical mass (the late majority on the technology adoption curve has been achieved), but now it's no longer hip.

I'm not sure what will be next, but I'm guessing it won't be Apple's.

Were I gambling man, I'd have shorted Apple's stock right there after that airplane ride.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#110

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

galad87 wrote: post #53
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't easily rewind a few seconds backwards There is a technical reason for this, and it's not a QT program problem, but rather a QT container problem. The QT container file does a horrendous job at synchronizing audio and visual streams. QT playback software exploits this problem, though, by intentionally lagging the start of a video by a few frames in order for the audio and visual streams to match up on the…

That's not true at all. QuickTime container can represent each frame timestamp exactly, and it has got some advanced features like edit lists. Every frame has got a start and stop time, and each sync sample is marked as such, it's even possible to mark on which sample each sample depends. In Matroska for example the stop time is so unreliable you often have to analyse the frame content or wait for the next frame to k…

No, I am referring to the delay introduced by compressed audio streams within QT container files. The issue I refer to does not seem to occur for lossless audio. In these situations, the cslg atom, among others, allow the QT format to reliably copy edited stream data without re-writing to the container file.

AAC, like MP3, introduces a padding of silence at the beginning of the stream. Because modern QT container files do not compensate for this, all audio and video streams within this type of QT file will be off sync by default. QT playback software waits for the audio stream to begin (waits for silence padding to end) before video playback begins, even though the streams themselves line up 1:1 in the container file. This is lazy engineering, not an advanced feature.

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