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If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

macworld.com

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Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#291

Post by whartung »

wtallis wrote: post #178
alphaomegacode wrote: post #70

As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room. Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was th…

I think your difficulties may stem from thinking of Time Machine as a backup application, when the UI is designed around treating it as a core system component. The configuration is all handled through System Preferences, and the UI you entered was solely for viewing and restoring files from your backup archive. You probably also missed a prompt to use the drive for Time Machine backups when you first plugged it in.…

Yea, the mistake encountered by the OP is that they were approaching the Time Machine UI with the intent of "I want to back up some folders".

The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything" not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).

And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not do what they wanted to do.

It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so good.

It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it all as a hat tip to offsite DR.

Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and start over.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#292

Post by yosito »

jjice wrote: post #274
makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

> why there are redesigns over and over and over

Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do.

It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#293

Post by nineplay »

jjice wrote: post #274
makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

> My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed.

I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.

So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it.

I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#294

Post by naravara »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #272
SavantIdiot wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you hate about Time Machine? I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks exactly like my old one. Never had an issue. I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check b…

The specific complaint was "the insane UI," if I read the comment correctly. Time Machine's UI is possibly the last holdover from Apple's peak sizzle-and-flash design days, the era of brushed metal and skeuomorph-all-the-things even when there isn't exactly a real-world analogue to emulate. To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But…

If you rotate your wallpaper every week or so it actually ends up being a pretty cool visual indicator that's probably more memorable for some people than a drop-down menu would be.

Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when you start rolling back.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#295

Post by hmrr »

passivate wrote: post #232
hmrr wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same. I disagree. It required two rounds of reboots even though it was the latest iso and the Ethernet didn’t work (i219). Then whenever the thing goes to sleep all the windows move to the top left of the screen when it wakes up.

Sorry to hear you're facing issues with the install! I simply presented my own experience, I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, so I am not sure what you're disagreeing with!

Just that it represents a roll of the dice and hardware configuration.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#296

Post by jonplackett »

Philadelphia wrote: post #285
jjice wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

Twitter has been so bad with this lately. It feels like the app is different in some irritating and pointless way every time I open it.

Yet every time the UI is still horrific. It’s like they’re trying the Edison way and trying to find the 99 ways not to do it.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#297

Post by moosedev »

jjice wrote: post #274
makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over.

It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".

And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.

When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.

I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics

[2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#298

Post by dekhn »

My belief is that Apple is milking Mac OS X for the last bits before finally releasing Xcode (which is basically the only real way to make iPhone apps) as a cloud service or porting it to Windows. I can't think of anything that, technically speaking, couldn't be done on Linux or Windows.

once mac os x is gone, their OS surface is so tiny and locked down that they don't really have to worry ever again.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#299

Post by koyote »

makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

> there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse.

I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem.

The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on.

I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason).

We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#300

Post by thelittleone »

I'm on a 2020 16" MBP. The screen blinks black as frequently and randomly as a human eye. The speakers audio pop frequently requiring reboot. Certainly not as bad as my lemon MBP 15" from 2018. But whether these continued problems are the fault of software or hardware I don't know. And does it matter? One of the draw cards of the Mac ecosystem is that the limited number of hardware devices should equate to more reliable systems.

An example, Macbook Pro back around 2013 had hardware volume and mute switches that worked instantly. Useful when going to a cafe, hitting mute as upon opening the lid to avoid blasting the room with music. Now with toucbbar, I get to the cafe, open the lid, the computer starts playing music and it takes 10-30 seconds to respond to touchbar controls.

I moved from PC to Apple back around 2005 for improved reliability, quality and simplicity. My first 10 years where great but the quality has declined so significantly that I've started trying linux distros.

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