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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#351
I happen to disagree about software quality getting worse. Most of the people in this thread bashing Xcode don't even know how to spell it, which should tell you something about their level of ignorance on the matter. I use it every day and the Xcode team has been knocking it out of the park.

And OS X -- it's hardy bad by any stretch. Mostly it's fantastic. There are the rare glitches, but as other commenters have said, there are several factors at work, what with increasing complexity, efforts to get platforms to work more closely together, proliferation of multicore CPUs, 64-bit, evolution of security and networking technologies, bringing Swift and modern programming language patterns into the technology stack, dealing with changes in unstable third party platforms, and preparing for whatever unknown things Apple has in the oven.

Apple is trying to bring the future to us. Doing this kind of work, over multiple versions with plans spanning years or even decades, is not simple. This kind of work has been likened to rebuilding a 747 aircraft while it's flying. IMHO it's probably even harder than that, and Apple is doing a damn good job so far.

Admittedly there's a lot of assertion here, from my own experience of things working just fine, and not much (even anecdotal) evidence, but I just wanted to say one needs to view the small bugs in the perspective of all the significant work that is being undertaken.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#352
post #59
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…

A lot of awful software shipped under Steve Jobs. X Code has always been a buggy mess, iTunes bloated greatly under Steve (remember Ping?), iMovie '08, etc etc.

Yes, good software applications from Apple have been the historical exception rather than the rule. Great hardware, good OS, mediocre software for the most part. This reflects the company's priorities as a hardware vendor: they make very little money from software, and hence have little direct incentive to put a lot of resources into it.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#353
post #99

The decline seems real to me. A shortlist of things I've noticed: * Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred. * iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and i…

Preview was pretty cool, and for the most part still is, but now it doesn't update any more when viewing a PDF not in page mode but in continuous scroll mode. That basically means I cannot use it for previewing Latex PDFs anymore.

Skim.app is very suitable for Latex PDF preview (it even supports syncing given you have an Editor that supports it too, e.g. Emacs AUCTex or TexShop).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#354
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows got so much flack over the years. It wasn't the prettiest but it worked and did what it said. No. Just No. Windows loves to "forget" things. Things like Bluetooth devices. Or wifi devices. Windows likes to update your laptop for you when you're trying to close it ("Don't turn off your computer..." Wait, what? I have a plane to catch!). Windows scatters files all over the place! And that registry. UGH!

When closing your laptop Windows goes into standby. It should only install updates when shutting down and it tells you that beforehand. So it "did what it said" ;) > Windows scatters files all over the place! Just have a look into your Library folder on OS X. Also some programs don't use that, but create a dot folder in your home directory. Maybe I'm missing something though? I haven't used OS X much lately.

Library is pretty well organized. Settings go in Library/Preferences, cache files in Library/Caches, persistent files that don't need to be exposed to the user go in Library/Application Support, and they're all organized by app name or bundle ID.

Apps which use dot folders in the home directory need to be smacked until they stop, but the OS can't really control where (non-sandboxed) apps put things, it can only establish conventions and encourage apps to follow them.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 iss…

Caveat: i havent used it on my main machine yet, so a lot of this is impressionistic; feel free to correct. Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly. The transparency is an abomination. If y…

>Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. The transparency is an abomination.

Well, those are not software quality issues. Some of those are design decisions, and have been with us forever, not random accidents: "Cut", for example, has never been on the Mac. Transparency in 10.11 is so lightweight you don't even notice it -- nothing Vista-like about it.

As for "total disregard of Fitt's law" that's not some decline either, as it's not worse or better than it has ever been in OS X.

>However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly.

Well, that qualifies as buggy software. But I have to wonder.

I've had an iBook, 2 MacBookPros (1 company issued), an iMac, a MacBook Pro Retina (current), 2 iPads and 2 iPhones thus far. And I've travelled all over the US, Europe and in several parts of Asia. I've never had any trouble with wifi, even to non-chain, el-cheapo motels.

The only offender has been my iPhone(s), which indeed I've not been able to connect to 3-4 places (restaurants etc) while traveling, over many hundreds of locations over 8 years. And I can't even know if it was because of the iPhone crapping out, or they using some crappy, third party router.

So I wonder, what are all those wi-fi issues people mention in forums etc.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#358

I think the decline is overstated. Couple related points- - They at least offer updates, many other vendors offer few to none. Is that how you achieve quality? My wife's iPhone4S is still receiving updates and she's been happy with the device since 2011 to today. I've always used competitor's products and never achieved this. As a result, we will continue and increase our scope of purchases from Apple. - Software is…

That's the vendors fault really, forcing their crap software onto the OS and not wanting to invest to keep things up to date to allow updates. Google and Microsoft both do regular updates to their OS, and if you go with a non-vendor phone (like Nexus), you'll get all those updates.

But yeah, the software situation from most phone vendors is atrocious.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things. OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows vers…

That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. First, because as said there were always issues. I fully agree. I jumped on the Mac and OS X bandwagon in 2007. The first few releases of Leopard (10.5) were quite hellish, because I was constantly having Wifi problems. My HP Laserjet didn't work until 10.5.2 (in 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 it would just print a few pages and get stuck). Snow Leopard w…

I agree that photos is a lot better than iPhoto & co. The performance is blazing and I migrated from lightroom to it because of it. I can't find a faster and easier to use photo library management app. Lightroom is really slow compared to it.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#360

I use OSX as a glorified terminal and the odd game. Unfortunately it's not a great gaming machine, and it's a horrible terminal. Out of the box, OpenSSL and OpenSSH are shipped broken and insecure, and I'm not sure how anyone could seriously use Safari. Games often come late or don't work as well as their PC counterparts and sometimes require remapping joystick buttons with a third (fourth?) party application. So by…

> I'm not sure how anyone could seriously use Safari.

I seriously use Safari everyday. Works fine for me. In my experience it's noticeably faster, more stable, and more battery friendly than Chrome.

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