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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#31

Post by ohgr »

I would disagree with the conclusion. It sounds like a faulty line of hardware on the M2 Air then.

My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues.

YMMV but they just work for us and the software, which not perfect, is probably the least shit out there.

I mean the trash heap in my office is mostly Surface machines as a comparison...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#32

Post by dharmab »

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.

I've been using fundamentally the same Linux setup for over ten years now. I think the biggest change it went through was migrating the audio system to Pipewire, which took about an hour to figure out and hasn't need attention since.

I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#33

Post by c_hastings »

mbrumlow wrote: post #3

Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have. I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.

I don't think this has to do with Covid or WFH. It is more likely that Apple is focused on showing huge profit margins, at the expense of hiring qualified staff, due to a quarter by quarter focus, in a mature market. When one person leaves, they don't get backfilled. You can hide a lot of sins with the aggressive push from marketing and focusing on hardware performance. How do you measure software experience? How do you brag about it?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#34

Post by capl »

diggan wrote: post #4

I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor…

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 trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.

The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#35

Post by [deleted] »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #16
827a wrote: post #5

Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability. I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' micropho…

> Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability. But since sales go brrrrr and so does the stock, why should they care?

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#36

Post by ohgr »

PaulHoule wrote: post #23

I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!) My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account…

You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#37

Post by realo »

kome wrote: post #17

but the hardware premium is kinda real... i have been using my macbook air 11 daily for 10 years (I am writing this comment on it), and it works flawlessly. somehow i don't think other brands are so well made, or they weren't so well made 10 years ago.

Yes but... but... Did you update it to the latest version of Mac OS (Sequoia) with all the security patches via official Apple channels ?

No you did not.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#38

Post by skyyler »

dylan604 wrote: post #22
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.

for a long time, iDevices could not copy&paste. locking to one of those versions with no new features would be horrendous. not all new features are bad or trivial. Edit: pedant patrol

Copy paste was added to like, iPhone OS 3.

It is technically incorrect to say that iOS could not copy paste at any point, as the copy paste feature was present in the first version of the software called "iOS".

To use a version of iPhone OS that can't copy or paste, you'd have to use the original iPhone or the 3G (not 3GS!)

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#39

Post by dijit »

alberth wrote: post #30

Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem? I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?

It’s not worse than Microsoft.

But somehow, Microsoft and Apple are inferior to their previous selves.

New features and bug fixes, yes. But we seem to lose a lot. In terms of quality, performance and unfeatures.

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