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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#291

Post by scarface_74 »

tbeseda wrote: post #27

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

Apple Music is basically the same as an Electron app. But it uses a native framework and technology and Apple’s markup language for the views - Apple Markup Language

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#292

Post by dsego »

markus_zhang wrote: post #66

I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion. It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.

> why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.

It takes courage.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#293

Post by scarface_74 »

linguae wrote: post #51
packetlost wrote: post #12

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who…

I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infras…

I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator.

Half the OS was still running under emulatiom

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#294

Post by bobsmooth »

FredPret wrote: post #7

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches. In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it. Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.

Windows 10 LTSC edition.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#295

Post by sp527 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

Mine was horrendous scroll jank in response to a moderate amount of highlighting in Notes. Mfs trying to harness AI and they can’t even render text properly… in 2025.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#296

Post by brailsafe »

tacker2000 wrote: post #140
madeofpalk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but...

Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#297

Post by youssefarizk »

Nothing infuriates me more than the fact that when you get a missed call, tapping on the call notification doesn't call them back, instead it takes you to their contact!!!

What's worse is that this is a regression, so they actively made life a little more difficult for everyone in the new release.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#298

Post by tannhaeuser »

legitster wrote: post #202
capl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember) The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of tryi…

Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.

While still anecdotal, I'll give you two data points:

The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse.

The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#299

Post by DidYaWipe »

brailsafe wrote: post #283
flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

Successfully reproduced. Rough. Maybe they counted on people bailing out after attempting to trudge through the sloppy mess that is the newish Settings app before they even got to the Change wallpaper section, forgetting that there was another path.

And that also raises a huge issue: The problem isn't just functional defects, but also design defects and regressions. The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated, from all the feedback I've seen. Apple is spending time dicking around with things that already worked and that will not drive sales through changes... so WTF? This faffing points to a major priority-setting problem within the firm.

Look at the state of Xcode, a tool that's fundamental to the iPhone's appeal. Every developer knows that this thing needs a massive rewrite. The word is that nobody within Apple even understands it thoroughly anymore, so it's way past time to strap it on and build a modern tool from the ground up that's maintainable, instead of slapping band-aids on Project Builder indefinitely. Come on, Apple, you can afford to throw resources at this for a year and just get it DONE.

Meanwhile, Apple is letting open, "urgent" QA personnel requisitions sit unfilled for YEARS. We can all see the results.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#300

Post by amelius »

4ndrewl wrote: post #85

I wouldn't call Apple's hardware as premium quality. Premium price yes, quality no - not since PowerPC times. I was an owner of the original crackbook, have had a magic keyboard, magic mouse both fail shortly after warranty period, I can't count the number of power leads that have started fraying (thank goodness for USB C!). Ass for iPhone screens - seem to be very breakable compared to other manufacturers.

I don't know why people, on this forum of all places, are raving so much about a piece of consumer electronics.

Comment typed on an industrial-grade system.

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