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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#211

Post by Mikeb85 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137
nextos wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat. A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So i…

Ubuntu has been doing the same thing as Apple with their new UI, trying to jump in on the tablet bandwagon, with this belief that tablets are the future. This is fairly stupid, considering that Ubuntu's marketshare was pretty much 100% PC, 0% tablets. They gave their main demographic a slap in the face, and they never really did acquire any tablet market. Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian…

> according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian in terms of popularity.

Distrowatch is a shitty indicator of anything other than Distrowatch hits. Plenty of people like myself have been using Ubuntu for years and not gone to Distrowatch for years.

Out 'in the wild', I've never seen a distro that's not Ubuntu or openSUSE (desktop anyway). Most statistics on sites such as Wikipedia or Steam also point to Ubuntu's dominance (according to Steam's hardware/software survey, Ubuntu is about 7x more popular than Mint Rosa, which of course is also Ubuntu-based).

> In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues.

To be honest, most of the issues I've ever had with Ubuntu are upstream issues. The 'Unity' interface these days pretty much IS the equivalent of 'legacy'. It's certainly not as radical as Gnome Shell or even some of the happenings in KDE Plasma-land. No one uses Compiz any more, except apparently Ubuntu (yes, I realize eventually we'll have a non-Compiz Unity interface).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#212

Post by smileysteve »

partiallypro wrote: post #57
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #7

While I agree that Apple's software quality has declined in recent years, I fear that their hardware and other advantages (even with superior hardware and software I don't trust a Google-or-Amazon-based phone for a second to be anything but a data mine for them), I fear Apple's existing lead in general quality will allow them to become (remain?) complacent and allow things to slide.

I don't even know if Apple owns the hardware quality title anymore. The Surface line from Microsoft is astounding in quality, and it's only a few generations old. This latest line did have some bugs (mostly due to Intel,) but overall when I walk into a Best Buy, and I feel a Surface Book and look over at a MacBook, one feels like the future, while one feels like it's hugging the past. The problem with Apple, and I've…

> The problem with Apple, and I've said this for ages, is that Apple is fashion. It's a status symbol, Sony used to be that same way, and look at it now. It had similar business verticals, pushed the same proprietary nonsense instead of adopting what the rest of the industry is doing and they were drowned as they began to expand their portfolio of devices.

Apple already did this when Microsoft released Windows and NEC made "clones" that worked really well for a lot less price.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#213

Post by coldpie »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137
nextos wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat. A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So i…

Ubuntu has been doing the same thing as Apple with their new UI, trying to jump in on the tablet bandwagon, with this belief that tablets are the future. This is fairly stupid, considering that Ubuntu's marketshare was pretty much 100% PC, 0% tablets. They gave their main demographic a slap in the face, and they never really did acquire any tablet market. Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian…

XFCE would be happy to have you :)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#214

Post by graeme »

cname wrote: post #147
graeme wrote: post #99

The decline seems real to me. A shortlist of things I've noticed: * Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred. * iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and i…

You don't use any of the default iPhone apps? I find that hard to believe. What about these: - calculator - camera - clock - contacts - messages - phone - photos - safari If you literally use none of these apps, I would be really surprised. Since we're sharing anecdotes: I've never had a problem with WiFi connectivity or Spotlight on El Capitan across multiple devices. I don't use iWork or Siri, so I can't speak to t…

Oops. I'll edit my comment. I use all of those. I was taking the ones that worked for granted.

Well, actually, I don't use Safari, but that's a very particular use case. I wanted to block sites, so I disabled Safari, enabled parental controls, and am using the Google app because it's less convenient and less likely to suck me into time wasters.

Though actually, the dictation search in Google now is better than Safari. And I like being able to have my homepage be a google search. Impossible in Safari.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#215

Post by Alupis »

addicted wrote: post #178
Alupis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iTunes was decent or even good You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out (until about 4.0?). Compared to its contemporaries, Music Match, which was a bloated piece of junk, and Winamp 2.x which while awesome, had a steep learning curve to get really useful (J for the win) and had an extremely unpleasant UI.

> iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out

It forced a bundled QuickTime install (still does I believe), and back then, it tried hard to become the default media player on your system (even reverting your "no" choice after updates). This led many people to remove QuickTime, only to discover now their iTunes refused to work. It would fail halfway through sync's and upgrades of iDevices routinely, had a generally pretty buggy interface that wasn't very responsive most of the time. It's iDevice backup process was cumbersome for normal users, and often failed without the user knowing (leading to very upset individuals when they needed to restore but couldn't).

Now it seems every new version redesigns the UI in major ways, causing even long term users to not know what to click, etc...

If you really just listen to music, maybe it's fine. For all other purposes, it was/is horrible, however I can't complain because it generated quite a lot of work for my side repair/contract business back then.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#216

Post by mikey_p »

dineshp2 wrote: post #180

It would seem sensible for Apple to fork an OS like Debian and focus on the distinguishing features of Mac OS such as the UI,gestures,power usage optimizations and Apple specific applications. From the user and developer point of view, the only major drawback would be applications. Devs porting over apps to linux and users not having some of their favourite apps available. It's becoming clear that Apple is not paying…

Except Apple already did this once, and honestly the under the hood bits are mostly fine. Virtually all the bugs that people complain about are in userspace programs, like Mail, Safari, or especially Finder. Using a different kernel and switching form BSD to GNU under the hood isn't going to fix any of that.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#217

Post by timdeneau »

tajen wrote: post #151
timdeneau wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think this is the root problem. The thing is, we don't need a new OS every year, and most people I know don't want to update their devices either. Where is the demand coming from?

Accelerated growth and capex. I once saw a very nice chart about the number of users for a great, cool start-up everyone knows about. The CEO illustrated: "You see that inflexion point on the release day? That's what happens for every release. If we postpone it by 3 months, we not only lose 3 months of new customers (painting the 3-months area between lower and higher sales). We also miss on the offset." and he paint…

But their growth primarily comes from hardware, how much would OS X updates influence that growth?

Their hardware from 2008 is running El Capitan, so there isn’t much persuasion for existing customers to upgrade. It seems like if someone is going to switch to Mac, they would do it regardless of any features introduced in the last 3-4 OS X releases.

I don’t know, I’m not a sales guy. But it seems like the tradeoff of losing your customer base due to unreliable software isn’t worth it.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#219

Post by droopybuns »

VonGuard wrote: post #172
tkinom wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on all the items. Not just Apple, I see similar issues with Google. Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly. Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation, extremely dangerous when I have to restart the navigate while driving. I can't depend on it at all. I have to roll back to the default factory install older ver…

All iOS issues with Google software, I suspect, have more to do with Apple being dicks to Google than with Google fucking up. Remember, Apple is really trying hard to rid iOS of all Google programs. Remember Apple Maps?

If you look at YouTube on android, I see evidence that they are f'ing up there in how advertisements are presented.

Put yourself on 144p quality. Watch a few videos till you get to an ad. It seems like they disregard your preference and pump up to 4k for your ad, which sucks when it takes 2 minutes to download a 30 second advertisement.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#220

Post by yggydrasily »

daheza wrote: post #31
dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

I haven't read much about Jobs but I wonder how he achieved the perfection in his product. Force the teams to work overtime to correct the bugs? Did he double the QA size in order to catch all these bugs? Did he demand that all code checked in must be at incredibly high standards, thus forcing the devs to QA more of their own code?

This is the best explanation I've ever seen. Just lots of focus, attention to detail, and iteration until they got it right:

http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...

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