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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#251

Post by jlarocco »

FireBeyond wrote: post #239
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…

Pages is an abomination. My partner was nearly in tears trying to do the most basic of table formatting. iOS app 'screenshots' (in task selection mode) are often dated, even after multiple openings of the app. I get that they are meant to be just that, snapshots, but if those aren't up to date, you may as well just show the app icon. Up to once a week, now, iCloud (in OS X settings) asks me to verify my password when…

> Up to once a week, now, iCloud (in OS X settings) asks me to verify my password when "nothing has changed" (no purchases, etc). It then spins for a long time and there's no acknowledgement that it 'succeeded'.

Only once a week?

Try refusing to log in. You'll get pestered every five minutes, sometimes more often than that.

Try disabling it after not logging in, and it asks you to log in to disable it, and then start pestering you even more frequently. Completely asinine.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#252

Post by kbenson »

graeme wrote: post #221
kbenson wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling someone a liar without providing any proof, or even good reasoning on why it's likely beyond the minimum "I find that hard to believe." provided, is an asshole move. Please don't do that. > Since we're sharing anecdotes Well, some of his points were anecdotes, some were observations about how he interacts with apple, and some were specific accounts of problematic functionality. > iCloud seems fine to me, but…

They didn't call me a liar. They just implied I was wrong. Big difference. You can be wrong without lying. I was wrong. I had forgotten that I do use several default apps, taking them for granted, and overstated my case.

Since it was a statement by you about your own actions, saying he thinks you are wrong in that wording is calling you a liar. It could, and I think should, have been worded differently if the intent was to probe whether you were being hyperbolic or mistaken. E.g.

"I'm not sure how someone would go about not using any Apple app, such as calculator, camera, clock, contacts, messages, phone, photos, safari. Do you not require a lot of what these apps provide, or have actually found good alternatives for each of them?"

or

"I really can't imagine not using any Apple apps. How do you get by without any of them?"

In each of these cases, the problem is presented as a failure of the asker's imagination or knowledge, and we ask for clarification on this point. IMO, this is a much more civil way to converse than starting out by questioning the veracity of someone's statements about theirself.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#253

Post by Thirdegree »

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…

The only issue I have with spotlight on El Capitan is a strange issue where sometimes after entering the first character the cursor jumps to start again and overwrites the first character, turning a search for "text" which should open TextEdit to "ext" which opens Extractor.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#254

Post by Keats »

As a very casual Apple user (ie I don't own any devices but I sometimes uses my girlfriend imac/macbook), I would say that this has been my opinion for a couple of years now. Pretty much everytime I use OSX or an iphone I run into bugs, as a short list from the top of my memory:

- iphone screen turning black with siri enabled and repeating that she couldn't hear what I said or something like that

- closing lid on macbook, re-opening -> no more wifi until you reboot

- itunes download progress disappearing after a few seconds, changing tab and coming back would show it again for a few seconds

- randomly losing wifi

I might be cursed when it comes to Apple software but that also means I won't go near an Apple car, even though I hope they have very different standards from the OS/phone teams.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#255

Post by msvan »

kps wrote: post #58
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…

For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7. I'd always assumed it was simply that Apple no longer cared about computers; in Jobs' own words, “milk the Macintosh for all it's worth and get busy on the next great thing.”

Context: that's a quote from 1996.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#256

Post by jshevek »

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…

> Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly.

Do you have t-mobile? T-mobile started throttling everyone's videos. I had problems similar to the one you describe and had to turn off tmobile's throttling 'feature' in order to get youtube to work correctly.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#257

Post by to3m »

ktRolster wrote: post #82
ssharp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX doesn't need to handle that many hardware and driver issues, so I don't see how that's relevant to a Windows comparison. I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux. And I'd say Windows had far more issues t…

>Also, a high percentage of OSX users have no idea what XCode is, let alone care if it's not as nice as VisualStudio. I really liked XCode, a lot more than Visual Studio, until they remade it to look like iTunes (around 2012). So there is definitely some preference involved for those people who say Visual Studio is better (and of course, vice versa).

Xcode 4 was a definite backward step in UX terms, in my view, from which the product has yet to recover. Xcode 4 has the dubious distinction of being one of only a handful of products that I've used daily for a good period - in Xcode 4's case, 20 months - without ever finding a way that I could be happy using them.

(Sometimes I just throw my hands up and decide that something, whatever it is, is just never going to be my cup of tea, and that's that. I've done that with a few software packages and/or styles of working. But in Xcode's case, I'm pretty sure it's them, not me. Because Xcode 3 was fine...)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#258

Post by pivo »

VonGuard wrote: post #165
fuzzywalrus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mavericks was tough to give up, stable, fast. No discoveryd. IMHO, its the best release of OS X. Maybe everyone has amnesia but pre 10.3, OS X wasn't really usable full time. Each 10.2.x release was a whirlwind of changes. Early iOS had wonky reset issues too.

Very true statements. However, those were growing pains. I feel like Apple's problem now is that it has completely given up on its overarching philosophy: to make software simple. Instead, they're just offering us their own versions of things just because they can, not because their's is any better. Maps being exhibit A, and Apple's mail client not changing in 10 years (aside from some minor adds and removes) are exa…

Regarding Mail, I don't really want it to change. Other than the improvements in stability and speed that I've noticed over the years, Mail.app is pretty much exactly what I want in a mail reader on OSX. Sometimes Apple's changes seem purely for the sake of change and result in reduced usability (e.g. Photos), I don't want that to happen with mail.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#260

Post by ThomPete »

I think the reason for this is that Jobs actually was a software man more than a hardware man. For hardware he had Ives.

Now that this combination is gone their software is slowly but surely going bad.

But another bigger issue is that Apple is still focusing too much on user interaction rather than system interaction.

The real advantages which we are gaining from technology is not a better input format or navigation scheme, but rather the use of weaker or stronger algorithms to remove the need for the user to interact with their machines.

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