Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s declining software quality

sudophilosophical.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 723 posts

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#271

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Alupis wrote: post #125
pbreit wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs didn't care about Xcode. iTunes was decent or even good. He hated social and reluctantly allowed Ping to go forward. iMovie is a tiny niche. I agree with OP. There is no way Steve would have allowed some of the current stuff to see the light of day.

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

iTunes sucks everywhere. And it's a horrible UX that it's needed for syncing an iPhone. A better UX would be just to plug it in and move things around.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#273

Post by jshevek »

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…

>Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background.

Exactly. Sounds like you agree with nextos:

> A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#274

Post by toyg »

danjoc wrote: post #264

Is it only their software? I don't really see their hardware as first class anymore either. Looking at Apple laptops, the newest Intel processor I can get is a 5th gen Broadwell, and it's only in the 13" retina. The 15" retina has 4th gen Haswell. And the 13" pro? Some old processor from 2012. 6th gen Skylake is shipping everywhere from every other laptop manufacturer. The 13" Macbook Air still has a sub-HD display.…

To be fair, their hardware has never been impressive in modern times, from a technical perspective, except in a very short timeframe (basically from the first Air model to the second MBPR model). Before then, everybody knew Apple laptops and desktops were fairly solid but hugely overpriced, and you paid for stylish design rather than innovative tech.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#275

Post by l33tbro »

tosseraccount wrote: post #195
jpeterson wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.

The Cult of Steve? It think it's actually declined a little.

That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people.

OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point.

The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation to a legacy brand. Acquiring Beats (can you imagine Steve championing this - lol), less of a focus on the high-end workstations for consumer electronics and watches, removing the grunt from high-end apps like Logic and FCP. Certainly no longer the underdog we root for, as the article points out.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#276

Post by pjmlp »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #160
nilkn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about Snow Leopard having been supposedly perfect and more about how OS X feels like it's just floundered around randomly since then. In fact, for me, I can honestly say that OS X has almost strictly regressed in terms of my day-to-day experience. Spotlight now covers up way too much of the screen for almost no gain; if I'd wanted that, I'd have just used Alfred. Mission Control is still not as powerful and…

For programming especially, yes. I can see that point. IMHO, an Android programmer in particular will find OSX more comfortable and supportive than Windows because Android Studio and drivers and stuff mostly _just work_ on a Mac. Example: get adb to talk to a Kindle Fire from your windows machine and then do that same thing from your Mac Example: install genymotion on your Windows machine and fiddle around with Virtu…

I develop on Windows and don't see the value on such examples.

Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices.

There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far.

I will become productive with Android Studio the day they are able to match what I already had with Ant, ndk-build and Eclipse ADT/CDT in terms of IDE/build performance and C++ support.

Keyboard shortcuts are the least that I care about in Studio.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#277

Post by crystalclaw »

kmfrk wrote: post #48

The worst thing about Apple is not the drop in quality, but the way in which every fan and user kicking and screaming about it doesn't make them realize how awful their products are. If we could just have a rule that said "don't get Apple's first version of a product", but they continue to be terrible. I recently lost my entire music collection because my Apple Music subscription ended, and now I have to download the…

I bought a first gen apple product with this in mind (new macbook), and it's been surprisingly good. My usb adapter sucks, yes, so that's a pain, but since it's not my primary computer it doesn't matter so much. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as their primary computer. That being said, when the next one comes out I'm ditching this one and getting the new one; first-gen apple products are really mostly proof-of-concept it seems. (iPad 1 vs iPad 2, for example)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#278

Post by mixmastamyk »

ChrisArgyle wrote: post #262
jonknee wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of awful software shipped under Steve Jobs. X Code has always been a buggy mess, iTunes bloated greatly under Steve (remember Ping?), iMovie '08, etc etc.

Don't forget early OS X. So slow it was nearly unusable until performance improvements in 10.3.

Improvements of a new OS are happily received. However, we're talking about the reverse, deterioration of mature products.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#279

Post by c06n »

czhiddy wrote: post #197
c06n wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2013 Macbook Pro keeps crashing with Firefox, a few times every day. I cannot use Firefox anymore, I had to switch to Chrome. And as I am writing this Mail crashed because I wanted to forward an Email with a large picture in it. And messages has crashed numerous times, I don't use that either anymore. So yes, for me Apple's software quality truly has declined sind Snow Leopard.

How is Firefox crashing an Apple issue, assuming you don't hit the same problems with Chrome?

I was probably unclear: The whole computer freezes, and there is nothing I can do except a "hard" reset, i.e. pressing the power button until it shuts off.

But there are more issues still, e.g. that the computer will only connect to my bluetooth radio after a restart.

Post reply on HN