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Apple’s declining software quality

sudophilosophical.com

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#301

Post by coldtea »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #278
ChrisArgyle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What mature products deteriorated (apart from iTunes) and in what concrete ways?

Mail is much better than it was even a year ago, XCode too, the OS is stable...

And FCPX didn't deteriorate over 7 -- it was a written-from-scratch reboot of the platform that just happened to cut some features people used (most got back with a vengeance).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#302

Post by tbyehl »

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.

| You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#303

Post by MBCook »

JonCox wrote: post #120
MBCook wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained That means that it's not properly maintained, which means declined. > or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent More eyes do find rarer bugs, and hundreds of millions of eyes is a LOT. But I can tell you from personal experience that all sorts of little simple things that used to work don't and it gets very obnoxious.…

+1 Anecdotally I've noticed a significant degradation of quality over the last year or so, everything from updating a new iOS device from on iCloud backup, general iOS bugs, OS X wifi connectivity issues etc etc. It's been noticeable.

Besides little long time bugs (like my device prompting for password because it's been 48 hours since last TouchID when it's actually been like 8) there are bugs in new things.

Since 9.0 (or so) using CarPlay I find that it occasionally messes up the audio engine on the phone requiring a restart to a fix. That means instead of my old weeks and weeks of uptime it now varies between 24h and 7d or so.

Having your phone not have audio work correct? Horribly obnoxious. Especially when 70% of what you do is listen to music and podcasts.

I gave up on Podcasts and switched to Overcast because Apple (despite years) was unable to correctly sync which podcasts I'd listed to and which I hadn't. I'm wary to buy things from iTunes because I end up with 2 or 3 copies in my library of some songs, randomly.

I STILL randomly get corrupted songs on my phone and occasionally have to reload all 45GB of music (everything I own, just easier since I have the space) to fix the issue. Don't know why.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#304

Post by coldtea »

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.”

>For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7

So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted.

A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of issues I have with Windows 10 or the Ubuntu box I use for development (actually that's far worse, but I digress).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#305

Post by newscracker »

I read this article thinking it would provide some new information in 2016 or even a lot of details about what "declining software quality" the author has been experiencing. Instead, I found that it's a poorly written re-hash and re-linking of what others have written about in the last couple of years.

The author's limited experience is mentioned in a few sentences without a lot of details. The whole article could've been trimmed down to just two paragraphs including the links to the other articles, considering that the linked articles are not "recent news" to have additional commentary and considering that other people have already written about it with commentary.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#306

Post by seivan »

bsbechtel wrote: post #98
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…

>>Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with. I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.

They (Designers and Product people) will one day learn that the single greatest feature and design, the most objective one is raw speed.

Always go faster for a long time. Meaning tackle long aged hardware, long uptime, and just generally maintain same performance. Across everything, from device hardware and speed locally on the device to the wifi/4G signals, ISP, to the backend and their software and hardware. Performance in speed is the greatest subjective design and feature.

Unfortunately the time to invest in it requires convincing the designer and product that integrating A/B tests for hearts vs star for favoriting isn't worth it for the long run.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#307

Post by arc0re »

c06n wrote: post #92
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #22

Is Apple's software quality truly declining? I've been an OS X user for a couple years now, and I'm perfectly happy with my laptop and its updates. Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent.

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.

Firefox is nowhere related to Apple of course, but it is so bad on Mac. I recently went back to Chrome because it just works so much better on my macbook. (El Capitan)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#308

Post by rconti »

pi-err wrote: post #76

> it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app) I find Photos.app to be the best Apple app I've ever used. It's simple, modern, works amazingly well between iOS and OS X, transparently manages 100GB of data between iCloud and local storage. This entire piece is surfing on Mossberg's take and goes way too far. From what we kno…

I don't see how anyone could call Photos.app the best app they've ever used. Right off the bat, I can never tell you why I'm in a mode where I can multi-select or not. When I double-click on a photo, all of a sudden an intermediate navigation thumbnail bar thing pops up, but it doesn't let me do the things the main thumbnail view does.

I don't know when I can use the back arrow or not.

Flagging no longer shows up on the pictures, so I have to look up to the menu bar to see if a photo is flagged.

I've got a few shared galleries with family. Does anyone know which photos are going to show up in Photos vs Albums (All Photos) vs Shared (Activity and your named shared galleries) and the My Photo Stream under Albums?

Virtually every time I recreate a photo library or get a new device, I need to turn off all the icloud syncing crap and photostream crap about 3 times before it finally starts syncing photos. And sometimes when it does, I click on a photo thumbnail and the wrong photo pops up.

Photos is effing TERRIBLE from a UI/UX, features, and functionality standpoint.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#309

Post by Osiris »

OS X has major Thunderbolt issues. OS X crashes nearly every time I put it to sleep with a Thunderbolt monitor connected (10.9 through 10.11), daisy chained Apple monitors aren't detected, Thunderbolt monitors aren't aways detected when plugged in (as in they don't turn on), waking up a machine after disconnecting Thunderbolt monitors sometimes results in a black screen where the OS thinks the monitors are connected.

Windows 10 on the same MBP, has none of these issues. OS X crashes significantly more often than any Windows machine I've used in the last 5 years (Windows 7-10). Apple used to brag about how OS X was more stable than Windows, but I think that Microsoft's need to make Windows compatible with so much hardware and software has actually resulted in a more robust and harder to crash OS.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#310

Post by _pmf_ »

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…

> 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.

Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs ... that's the guy with the skeuomorphic preferences, right? The one who, at the first iPhone release, told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough, right?

Just to make sure we're on the same page here.

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