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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#201

Post by schmidtleonard »

woleium wrote: post #180
schmidtleonard wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after. To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions…

That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”

That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#202

Post by legitster »

capl wrote: post #34
diggan wrote: post #4

I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor…

Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember) The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of tryi…

Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#203

Post by tannhaeuser »

The phenomenon of software quality/usability going down aka the second system effect isn't specific to Mac OS, to say the least. I actually left Linux behind on the desktop which has gross regressions since 2016 yet unlike Mac OS hasn't gained a single app or end user feature to make up for it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#204

Post by legitster »

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…

> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality

I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.

15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#205

Post by bombcar »

DrillShopper wrote: post #61
1980phipsi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The podcast app is the same shoddy-ness. Re-arranging things in the queue is such a PIA.

Apple Music, at least when I last used it, could not handle copying podcasts to my old iPod Video - this is now handled in Finder, as best as I can tell. It will copy the tracks, but it doesn't properly flag them as podcasts so if I switch to another track and then go back to the podcast it does not remember my location. Never had that problem with iTunes.

If you set your podcasts as AudioBooks and copy them in THAT area, it remembers where you were, at least. But you have to play them through Books.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#206

Post by karmakaze »

diggan wrote: post #4

I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor…

Apple's behavior makes sense when you realize that Apple caters to potential customers more than current ones. Their products are made to demo well to prospective customers. Every Apple product owner/user is inadvertently doing sales demos to onlookers.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#207

Post by skinkestek »

DannyBee wrote: post #145
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep... same with google... Make old chat system better (or just maintain it?)... meh boring... Make new google chat.. talk.. alo.. i mean hangouts? Yep, promotions, bonuses!

I mean, it's not always like that, at Google it always depended on the business unit. To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else. I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time the…

> and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.

Maybe you are right.

From the outside however, the situation looks very different:

- reader? destroyed

- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.

- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.

(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)

Picasa? Replaced with a w3b service.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#208

Post by karmakaze »

flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one.

BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#209

Post by skinkestek »

stavros wrote: post #24

I tried an iPhone for three months or so, ending a month ago, and I was really disappointed by the experience. I thought Apple was still a company that focused on UX, but it was eye-opening to see that they had lost their way. There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen…

I went from using a series of Android phones, including a number of flagship phones and finally tried iPhone in 2018 after custom keyboards became available (no way I'd accept the built in back then).

At that point the cheapest iPhone option available outperformed every android phone I'd used at that point and I was sold.

Still think the software could need some love but at least it does not feel like my phone has to do a call to a lagging wev service to open the camera.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#210

Post by stavros »

skinkestek wrote: post #209
stavros wrote: post #24

I tried an iPhone for three months or so, ending a month ago, and I was really disappointed by the experience. I thought Apple was still a company that focused on UX, but it was eye-opening to see that they had lost their way. There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen…

I went from using a series of Android phones, including a number of flagship phones and finally tried iPhone in 2018 after custom keyboards became available (no way I'd accept the built in back then). At that point the cheapest iPhone option available outperformed every android phone I'd used at that point and I was sold. Still think the software could need some love but at least it does not feel like my phone has to…

Yep, things weren't great 7 years ago.
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