Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#181

Post by packetlost »

hanikesn wrote: post #167
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.

Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.

Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#182

Post by legitster »

Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast with Joe Rogan (massive grain of salt, please) talked about the protocol that Airpods use to connect. Apple is reluctant to share the protocol under the guise of "security" and "privacy". But when Meta finally had a chance to review it, it was apparently all unencrypted and all the keys were stored in plaintext.

But this tracks with a lot of other explanations they have put out over the years about why they can't put out basic features or fix UI flaws.

For interpreting Apple PR, I have re-appropriated Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to User Experience that which is adequately explained by incompetence or indifference”

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#183

Post by gloosx »

flohofwoe wrote: post #143
drdo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this "Custom Color"? I clicked the "+" icon to open the color picker and did as described and I cannot reproduce this. Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)

Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget. I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background. After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replac…

I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#184

Post by pndy »

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.

I have this conversation with my partner quite often. We'd like to use operating systems, software that stays "still" and doesn't break usage workflow every release with changes just for the sake of change. We both think that major commercial operating systems/software is largely feature complete. And everything done nowadays is just for keeping up the "freshness" appearance with all sort of meaningless GUI overhauls or features of doubtful usefulness that marketing branch everywhere pushes.

It really feels like the quality was replaced by... lipstick on a pig. And honestly, I am fed up with all this pandering of the changes as a breakthru, live changing technology.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#185

Post by eviks »

skyyler wrote: post #57
realo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but... but... Did you update it to the latest version of Mac OS (Sequoia) with all the security patches via official Apple channels ? No you did not.

I don't think you can update any 10-year-old windows computer to the latest version of windows (11) with all security patches via official microsoft channels. (Also, lol @ "via official Apple channels", you're aware Open Core Legacy Patcher is a thing and have hedged against people mentioning it.) What are you comparing to?

You can easily patch a config file in Windows and install it on old hardware and get regular updates as usual.

OCLP is more complicated and limited as it's not a "some manifest config limitation", but actual support parts of OS being removed, so they have a big lag and a bunch of issues, and limit your updates

So yeah, no contest comparision between Mac and Win

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#186

Post by shagie »

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…

There's other economics to it at play which you hint at.

The "pay a premium for no new features" tends to imply a "I paid $99.99 for this once, all future updates for bug and security patches are free".

This in turn means that there's no money incoming (especially as the software goes further and further from feature parity with competition) to pay those developers who are doing the bug and security fixes.

While new features can be (often are) buggy, the new features and upgrades that are coupled with the software (and hardware) that have people buy ${new thing} in turn subsidizes the effort to fix ${still supported thing}.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#188

Post by SSLy »

criddell wrote: post #138
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.

I use Apple Music on my Windows work computer and it's pretty good. I still have iTunes on my home Windows PC (I use it for ripping CDs) and it takes much longer to start.

> I use it for ripping CDs

may I introduce you to cyanrip or EAC? https://github.com/cyanreg/cyanrip https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/downloa...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#189

Post by lostlogin »

ohgr wrote: post #123
lostlogin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need a blocker if you run PiHole? It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.

Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.

Oh wow. Thanks for this.

I just run Pihole in a container, and a spare one is on a NAS. I’ve learned the hard way, losing DNS is a shit show and a spare server saves you.

Added complexity has its downsides.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#190

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN