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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#161

Post by tacker2000 »

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.

Yea im also getting tired of the constant updates and featuritis.

I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff. No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#162

Post by Krssst »

kccqzy wrote: post #100
treve wrote: post #10

Apple had to switch CPU architectures and build their just to make their OS feel as snappy as KDE and Gnome does on mid-tier hardware. I wonder how long it will take until enough technical debt accumulates to a point where Mac OS feels like it drags again. The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the spa…

A recent blog post in the Apple fanboy world posited that Apple has slow, non-user-adjustable animations that make the OS feel slow. That's basically why a user thinks KDE or Gnome is snappier. It has nothing to do with CPU architecture. I still have an Intel Mac and it doesn't feel significantly slower than one with Apple silicon.

> KDE or Gnome is snappier.

Last time I installed Gnome I had to install an extension to remove the 150ms delay on alt-tabbing that is present even when animations are disabled. It became snappy after that.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2741/remove-alttab-de...

As for KDE I did not find how to disable animations when using Wayland. I would be happy to know (while keeping Wayland).

(I still prefer using customizable OSS software over "we know better than you" closed source software)

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#163

Post by reader_1000 »

As an iPhone user, I can only agree that Apple's software quality is just going backwards. Keyboard is terrible, it suggests words that are completely unrelated. Control center is becoming worse at every update. You can't still select text in the messages. Wifi is always unstable. You can't turn off wifi, etc.

Also my father used to use the feature of announcing outgoing calls when call is made by Siri, they removed it and I saw that many blind people also used to use this feature. I don't know what they thought while removing this feature.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#164

Post by eviks »

ryandvm wrote: post #59
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.

A side effect of employing tens of thousands of full time people that do product development is that matter how good your product currently is, there is an entire organizational hierarchy that has to justify its existence. The result is that every great product keeps picking up parasitic features and functionality. Intended to add value, but paradoxically removing overall value. There is a fine line between staying a…

Oh, there is a gazillion of bugs and broken fundamentals to justify the existence of those thousands for a long while!

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#165

Post by CoryAlexMartin »

deegles wrote: post #46

I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.

Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#166

Post by kjkjadksj »

alberth wrote: post #49
dijit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not worse than Microsoft. But somehow, Microsoft and Apple are inferior to their previous selves. New features and bug fixes, yes. But we seem to lose a lot. In terms of quality, performance and unfeatures.

I'm aware of UI inconsistencies, like this dated article below. https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte... But was curious is are people having stability & reliability type of software quality problems.

I am. Many of my old launchd services don’t work anymore. Well they run, the job begins, but then it can’t write to its files. I have no clue how they borked the permissions but something is up. The script works when I run it myself. As far as I can tell the launchd process should run the script as me the user in terms of permissions. It manages to run the script but doesn’t write to file. I am at a loss and gave up on debugging those services for now.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#167

Post by hanikesn »

packetlost wrote: post #12

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who…

Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#168

Post by ltadeut »

Glad it's not just me thinking that. The amount of UI bugs I encountered in the last few macOS versions is fairly annoying.

Very often, when I switch input keyboards between English/Mandarin, the popup that appears to indicate the selected language just won't go away automatically. I have to manually go and click somewhere to get rid of it. Also had loads of issues with notifications not rendering correctly.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#169

Post by eviks »

markus_zhang wrote: post #156
Klonoar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, lo…

You missed an indication that you need to scroll, that's certainly bad design, though fixing it doesn't require the full fat bar (not that I'd object to a proper global setting for users who like that!).

(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#170

Post by kergonath »

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.

> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software

It used to be the case a long time ago. I think it was decent up to iTunes 5 or 6. They crammed into it iPod apps and stuff, which resulted in a terrible UX. Then came the UI lag.

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