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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#151

Post by criddell »

dsr_ wrote: post #47
FredPret wrote: post #7

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches. In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it. Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.

You probably would, but that's the number one complaint about Debian: "Where is my fix of new shiny?"

My complaint isn't about new shiny, but new safe. Sandboxing apps on Linux is getting better but it still has a ways to go to catch up to macOS.

I'm talking about things like how a weather app shouldn't have access to the filesystem, or camera, or microphone, etc... A calculator shouldn't be able to see my location or even what networks I'm connected to.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#152

Post by inasio »

My daughter uses one of my old 2017 Macbook pros (nice hardware, everything works fine). I learned yesterday that she cannot use Pages because OSX cannot be upgraded to 10.14, which is a requirement for Pages (I suspect the same thing will happen with other Apple software).

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#154

Post by zimpenfish »

lostlogin wrote: post #101
tempodox wrote: post #19

> For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend. Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's. By now it has become…

> as shitty as Microsoft's. If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one. Clunky AF. Mac software might be at a low-point, but it hasn’t burnt down yet.

> If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one.

After a restart (which happens a lot because the machine crashes a lot[0]), my Windows 10 box won't be "ready for use" for a good 10 minutes. I've seen it take 30 minutes. I've done macOS updates that have taken less time.

Oh and macOS doesn't randomly reboot to apply updates. Still haven't found a way to prevent Windows from doing that.

[0] I suspect the 3080 but it frequently crashes when idle on the desktop which shouldn't be stressing anything GPU-wise.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#155

Post by taeric »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #94
FredPret wrote: post #7

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches. In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it. Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.

It's ironic you would pay a premium when the biggest reason for continued "new features" is to justify an SaaS sales model. Excel '98 probably covers 95% of users use cases. But here we are.

This has to be related to the curse of "can it scale?" that our industry is in love with. I think it is safe to say that MS Access and related programs were probably already covering a large majority of use cases back when they existed. On modern machines, they could probably cover larger companies better than folks want to admit.

Will they work for the largest companies out there? Of course not. This despite the fact that they probably did help get those companies off the ground.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#156

Post by markus_zhang »

Klonoar wrote: post #147
markus_zhang wrote: post #66

I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion. It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.

I mean as a user I haven’t thought about a scroll bar in years. The way the OS works with the hardware for touchpad usage means it’s just not a big deal. Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.

I don't know, but missing scrollbars is very frustrating in some cases. I literally missed some configurations because of that when I first used a Mac. There was a configuration window that needed some scrolling to show all options, but I missed that because there is no scroll bars.

Yeah but I agree that everyone has their own flavors. I personally prefer the Windows 2000 ones...I'm old. Never liked the flat ones, looks soulless.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#157

Post by dharmab »

csomar wrote: post #62
FredPret wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. The mental peace you've gained this way probably vastly outweighs the initial investment and missing out on the newest "features".

My archlinux has moved from a bunch of scripts to just a window manager with Chrome. At the end of the day, you realize you don't really need all these gadgets and notifications but just a terminal and a browser.

Yup, my core applications are Kitty, Vim, coreutils, Firefox, and pcmanfm.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#158

Post by anentropic »

tbeseda wrote: post #27

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

The experience of browsing the iTunes store is laughably bad...

The back button that goes back multiple steps while losing context of stuff you had clicked in between, the way the search box is in a whole other part of the UI and it has a three mode toggle. The way that clearing the search phrase does a new search for "".

The other day I bought an album on Bandcamp and imported it. Music app adds a "show complete album" link when I view the album in my library. Instead of doing anything useful this link clicks through to a whole different album in the iTunes store.

Or yesterday I browsed to "Joni Mitchell" and got some kind of curated homepage for the artist with background image art etc. The albums are grouped under a series of headings ("60s/70s" and "80s/90s") that don't include all her albums. There's no way to 'view all'.

You literally can't reach say "Blue" without going back out and searching for it explicitly.

Just idiotic and broken features left right and centre.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#159

Post by alpaca128 »

alberth wrote: post #30

Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem? I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?

When I bought my first Mac (M2) I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 buttons in the right order. It was fixed months later at least. To this day the mouse hover zoom animation for the dock freezes regularly and it happens on two separate devices. "Coincidentally" this animation was disabled by default. The preinstalled image viewer cannot open more than about 50 images without randomly distributing them across multiple windows and/or spamming a series of error messages telling me that some of the files cannot be accessed. When I click on certain video files in the file open dialog, some thumbnail process allocates over 25GB memory within seconds and the system becomes near unusable for a minute or two.

I would say it’s roughly comparable to Windows 10/11, which fell off a cliff in terms of quality. But to be fair Mac OS can handle much longer uptimes, today my Macbook force rebooted after about 250 days and it ran perfectly fine up to that point.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#160

Post by hbn »

garyrob wrote: post #117

In the current MacOS release, if I type Time Machine in the System Settings search box, it shows what I was looking for: "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar". But if I click that, it shows the switch for the Keyboard Brightness menu bar control, and doesn't show anything about the Time Machine menu bar item!

Apple cannot figure out how to do a search in settings for the life of them. It's been broken on iOS basically since it was added. Do any googling about iOS settings search and you'll only find people talk about it to rant about how bad it is.
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