Apple’s declining software quality • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#241

Post by loaaa » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

tkinom wrote: post #141

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…

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…

youtube for IPad is terrible:

1. it has no back button. sometimes I watched video a, then from the recommend list there is video b and video c I select video b, then the recommend list update if I want to see video c, I have to search again

2. there is no sound volume button, each time I have to use the button in ipad

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#242

Post by jlarocco » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

I've been complaining about this for a while now, and I'm glad more people are experiencing it and complaining.

I honestly dread Apple software updates because I know they're not going to fix anything I care about, and they're going to break stuff or arbitrarily replace perfectly fine, working features with new half-assed implementations that are buggy and don't work as well.

The latest example came just a couple days ago when I finally updated to the latest iOs, hoping maybe they've made it possible to remove the "radio" feature from Music. They haven't, and as bonus they replaced the "app close" screen with an ugly, broken one for no good f'ing reason; and the top info display with service/time/battery level now covers the top 20 pixels of several apps, obscuring the view in those programs. And they've added a few new crappy apps I have no interest in using, but can't remove.

I still think their hardware is awesome, but their software is going down the drain.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#243

Post by arc0re » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

Just a note, I was sick of Spotlight too, and I switched to Alfred, which is actually the "father" of spotlight. And it is way better than Spotlight now. You should give it a try

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#244

Post by dineshp2 » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

mikey_p wrote: post #216

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.

Many major issues regarding security,filesystem keep cropping up(there are a couple of links in the article). The idea is that instead of spending time and effort trying to maintain the OS, they can instead use the battle tested linux and focus exclusively on the distinguishing features.

And this will hopefully enable Apple to focus on the issues in the userspace.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#245

Post by auggierose » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

Preview was pretty cool, and for the most part still is, but now it doesn't update any more when viewing a PDF not in page mode but in continuous scroll mode. That basically means I cannot use it for previewing Latex PDFs anymore.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#246

Post by api » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

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…

I still don't understand why anyone thinks tablets are "the future" for anything other than passive consumption of content.

Convertible tablets like Microsoft Surface don't count -- those are laptops with detachable keyboards.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#247

Post by pyre » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #211

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ub…

> The 'Unity' interface these days pretty much IS the equivalent of 'legacy'.

Really? In such a short time it's considered 'legacy' now? The Gnome 2.x interface is legacy, but I wouldn't consider Unity to be so.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#248

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #211

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ub…

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#249

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #32

koralatov wrote: post #12

It feels a little clichéd to say it, but I do feel that Snow Leopard, outdated now as it is, was some kind of fortuitous confluence of factors that resulted in OS X being as close to perfect as it's ever been. Even putting aside the iOS-style elements being added, my experience has been that each version of OS X has been slightly worse than the last, and tends to introduce strange little anomalies and instabilities o…

I've noticed the same thing, but with one proviso: Only after an upgrade, rather than a clean install. And with quite literally every major OSX release since Snow Leopard. Just generalized instability and "weirdness" for lack of a better term. The problems always seem to go away after a fresh load. It sucks that this is required, but between Time Machine bringing my apps and settings back, and launching the upgrade a…

Your post reminded me of something: after years of doing Time Machine enhanced updates, last year I did a fresh install without Time Machine. I think that this made things better, but I can't really be specific why.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#250

Post by bsbechtel » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #196

lubonay wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't upvote this enough. So many products have been ruined by feature creep, it's sad to even think about it...

Its interesting to think about - is feature creep uniquely in the domain of software? I don't think so. There is plenty of software that has been immune to it (think everyday developer tools, command line stuff, etc). Often the apps with the least amount of feature creep are the ones where they are bounded by the APIs they talk to, i.e. if the API (which they don't control) is static, they can't really add any more f…

I think it boils down to asking what the product is actually for, or rather, what fundamental human need does it solve? That's a rather tough answer for computers, but for cars it's easy - getting from point A to point B. Every modification to a car is in pursuit of either making the job more efficient or making the job easier/more comfortable for the customer.

I think the fact that the answer is so tough for computers is why feature creep is so common with software. When your tool can literally do anything you want it to, why say no? The constraints are actually in the mind of the customer.