Apple’s declining software quality

Notes just received a pretty significant upgrade. And Photos was upgraded recently as well -- for better or worse. You picked the two most recently upgraded apps as being in need of an upgrade.

Few things here.

My last solid OS X machine was a 17" MBPro with a G4. I forget the OS - Cheetah maybe? That year I also had a developer Intel box. It seems like it was that transition that I could really feel things were going awry.

I'm not talking about the dev box, it was what came after. I had a MBPro 15" Intel machine that was really buggy hardware-wise. yOu could no longer apply updates without rebooting (something we all disapprovingly looked down on at Windows). The software just didn't work anymore either, or at least it felt like it didn't.

I think a lot of this was tied to more and more embedding of Apple apps, just like Microsft did. That and gaining some sort of complacency because they were not the scrappy underdog.

I've been waiting for another Snow Leopard where Apple just says "no more 'features', just bug fixes and stability" (for iOS as well). bUt I think that's just a pipe dream at this point and the train of more is better had already left the station.

Here is the author's list of gripes:

On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.

I've found myself thinking along similar lines. The two biggest offenders in my opinion are (1) feature bloat and (2) poor UX/UI decisions. iTunes is a prime example of how the confluence of both can turn a relatively simple and popular app into a quasi-unusable nightmare.

I've also noticed a lot more freezing and kernel panics on my iPhone, to the point where I've stopped updating the OS for fear of what might be introduced in the next version.

What? For me it was always super slow, ugly and unfunctional. Reminded me of Divix player.

I'm glad to see that other people have noticed this. iTunes has always been a pain to use, but otherwise Apple's software used to be incredibly robust and worked well. Nowadays Apple seem to be pushing out updates without proper testing. It's got to the point where I'm hesitant to actually update my devices for fear they'll become unusable. And that's never good.

At one point both my MacBook and my iPhone were suffering from regular graphical glitches. It's still an occasional problem, but at least Apple have got on top of it for the most part. I just wish they'd do something to stop my iPhone from kernel panicking and automatically restarting itself every so often.