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

Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#311

Post by laweijfmvo »

swat535 wrote: post #212

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere. Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not a…

There are plenty of us that would love to just sit and fix things all day, but then you get a poor performance review for not shipping new features and find yourself out of a job :)

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#312

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

legitster wrote: post #204
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…

> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia. 15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catc…

I think regarding the combination of usability and stability the Win XP/7 era was still unbeatable.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#313

Post by desertrider12 »

WatchDog wrote: post #301
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.

My last experience with iTunes was a long long time ago, in the iPod days, when you needed to use it to sync music, but it was a horrible piece of software back then.

It’s more horrible now. Syncing now opens a Finder window with an inconsistent look and feel, and sometimes fails to copy new songs in a synced playlist. The playlist view has the album art taking up half the screen, but there’s no way to shrink that section. And there’s no visual indication for whether shuffle is on - it has no grey box around it when enabled.

I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#314

Post by rafaelmn »

nicce wrote: post #243
swat535 wrote: post #212

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere. Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not a…

All of that can be summarized with Electron, web developers and high availability of workworkforce with somewhat low salary…

Except none of Apple stuff is Electron based, and as far as I am aware of Apple salaries are competitive with top companies - so none of your arguments really hold up.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#315

Post by tannhaeuser »

int_19h wrote: post #134
drcongo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?

You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).

That's preferable to Windows 11 requiring a cloud account in my book.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#316

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

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.

That's what I think too. I prefer the same UI for 30 years. I don't care about any "UI new age" stuffs.

TBH I don't even care about security anymore, like our data has been sold left and right already. As long as I don't get phished, I avoid 80% of the bad actors out there.

I already removed some update software from Ubuntu, those update notifications are very frustrating.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#317

Post by xyst »

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…

Works for me on latest macOS. Maybe your hardware is SOL? Can you share the video?

Reminds me of the butterfly keyboard issue of the 2016-2019” model year MBs.

If your warranty is still active could try to get the trackpad replaced.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#318

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

freedomben wrote: post #84
FredPret wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. The mental peace you've gained this way probably vastly outweighs the initial investment and missing out on the newest "features".

100%. I'm not OP but have had similar experience. My basic UX hasn't changed beyond trivialities in pretty well over 10 years. Contrast that with SaaS and many modern mobile apps that get completely redesigned every couple of years whether you want them to or not, and you have zero control on even the timing of the update. I've found a lot of refuge in open source as complete redesigns just for the hell of it (or to…

I just wish the Linux desktop experience were better. I'm going to give Deepin a try as it is focused on desktop experience.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#319

Post by danjl »

Apple should Open Source its OSes and internal apps. Of course this is very NOT-Apple, but it would allow folks to fix their apps. There's really no advantage to keeping it all proprietary. Apple's software teams are completely under water whereas Apple customers are diehards and would gleefully help fix issues. It would avoid the need to reproduce problems internally prior to ranking their importance for the internal team to fix. Besides, MacOS roots are in Open Source.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#320

Post by amluto »

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.

> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software

Excuse me?

iTunes was IMO always bad. I will grant that the Mac desktop version of Apple Music is possibly even worse than iTunes ever was, though.

(This is slightly off topic, but I find it both amusing and rather infuriating that the iCloud payment system doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Oddly, it seems to accept PayPay. Really, just about everything involving the account and payment system in iCloud and Apple Music is awful.)

Post reply on HN