Apple's Software Quality Crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#321

Post by hnthrowaway0315 » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #112

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.

iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work. For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.

Yeah that is very frustrating. I recently went to Ubuntu and picked the minimum installation. I then installed a bunch of development tools such as `build-essentials` and `git`. Other than Youtube crashing on Firefox, the whole experience, at least for the programmer part of me, is very satisfying.

BTW debugging still takes a lot of effort to setup in VSCode / or have to write init scripts for GDB which I suck at. I think Visual Studio debugger beats everything on Linux for that purpose.

Maybe I really need to try out Windows LTSC?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#322

Post by amluto » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

hbn wrote: post #65

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 on Mac definitely needs a ground-up rewrite, though I worry it'll lose uncommonly used features, like the ability to upload and stream your own music. I think a lot of Apple Music weirdness is from the fact that it's been built up over the years upon iTunes, which was essentially a completely different product that offered different thing. No one is really buying digital music any more, but they still nee…

The upload-and-stream-your-own-music feature, as handled by the Mac desktop Apple Music app, seems to be 90% bug and 10% working. I can’t imagine a rewrite being worse than the status quo.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#323

Post by hnthrowaway0315 » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:06 AM UTC

Kon-Peki wrote: post #246

mrweasel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work. For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.

> doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3 Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and desc…

Ah, I wish I could get a job like that -- both hardware and software. I need to take out the STM32 dev board I purchased a few years ago and started writing software for it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#324

Post by xyst » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:08 AM UTC

roody15 wrote: post #268

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default. You are not prompted or asked to enable. After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored. This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality.…

This issue was so annoying since “apple intelligence” debuted. I would have to manually toggle off for each device that updated.

But at least since 15.3.0, for me, it’s no longer an issue.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#325

Post by knifie_spoonie » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:09 AM UTC

kridsdale1 wrote: post #269

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown? Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen. The cherry on top: eit…

I bought a custom HMDI dongle that forced 4k RGB HDR for my OLED LG from M1 Mac.

Interesting. Could you post a link to the dongle?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#326

Post by khana » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#327

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

kridsdale1 wrote: post #274

crossroadsguy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, and many others in our personal capacity, have been shouting from hn-rooftops how Apple’s software capacity has been in a state of, since a decade or so (or more really) that calling it bad would be an understatement. It’s downright pathetic. It’s disgustingly incompetent. And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. Because those go beyond pathetic. I mean for god’s sake these morons (yes, “morons”…

Now tell us how you feel about windows.

Don't get me started on Windows!

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#328

Post by hnthrowaway0315 » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:15 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #251

Using the backend services (iTunes Connect, etc.) is painful . Also, don't get me started on the current state of "documentation." At one time, Apple had a huge team of ridiculously overqualified documentation people. They often had better chops than the engineers.

This reminds me of the recent reading of "Inside Macintosh" on archive.org. I really hope they produce similar paper documentations nowadays. I'd love to hold a dictionary of obscure Mac internal knowledge.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#329

Post by rglover » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:16 AM UTC

Quality is a synonym for care. And if the leadership doesn't care, the teams building the software won't care (at least, not as much).

Putting a logistics guy like Tim in charge was great for ensuring Apple kept shipping existing hardware products and growing revenue, but almost guaranteed that quality across the board would falter. For all of his faults, the one thing that Steve Jobs did that's impossible to replicate by force is care.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#330

Post by nicce » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 12:16 AM UTC

rafaelmn wrote: post #314

nicce wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My reply was mostly for the parent comment.

Apple software is still top tier when you start comparing to Slack, Teams, and all the non-native friends. Apple Music does not take close to 1GB of RAM. There are very few native applications these days because of the cost. And lower cost availability is based on the web stack and lower entry level of skills.

MacOS may have bugs but in general they are well engineered. Starting from secure enclave that none of the competitors have, or just raw performance and battery life that is not just hardware. I haven’t seen a single bug in my Watch for over a year. I guess it depends what you use.

The most bugs that we see these days are originating from the choices behind the tech stacks. Python and pure JavaScript are still too popular. Every post here with Rust name on it gets attention because of its promise of some level stability reduced resource footprint.