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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#371

Post by elsurudo »

doomlaser wrote: post #337
elsurudo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everybody hates skeumorphism, especially when not taken to an extreme (okay, Apple under Jobs often did take it to an extreme... like the leather Calendar app). But skeumorphism, when used properly, provides affordances and hints to the user. > told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough That's because the SDK wasn't ready for developers yet. You must remember that, fir…

No, they weren't going to do a public SDK, until after the huge sustained public outcry. I understand the plan was to work with select third parties on a case by case basis, sort of akin to standalone game consoles.

Oh really. That, I wasn't aware of. Well, at least they saw the cash cow that the App Store could become at some point, and acted. It's good to change your mind when new information comes to light.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#372

Post by Animats »

This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong?

Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface specs, heavy Q/A, tough regression tests, formal methods. It's expensive, but Apple ships so many copies that the cost per unit is insignificant.

Microsoft did that, starting with Windows 7. Two things made Windows 7 stable. The first was the Static Driver Verifier, which examines driver source code to check if there's any way it can crash the rest of the OS. This includes buffer overflows. The driver may not work, but it won't take the rest of the kernel down with it. All signed drivers have passed the Static Driver Verifier, which anyone can run. Driver-caused crashes stopped being a big problem.

With the driver problem out of the way, any remaining kernel crashes were clearly Microsoft's fault. (This has the nice problem that kernel bugs could no longer be blamed on third party drivers.) Microsoft had a classifier system developed which tries to group similar crash reports together and send the group to the same developer. It's hard to ignore a bug when a thousand reports of crashes from the same bug have been grouped together.

That's part of how Microsoft finally got a handle on their software products. Is Apple doing anything like this?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#373

Post by symlinkk »

natch wrote: post #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 sa…

I don't think releasing stable software is harder than rebuilding a 747 while it's flying. Especially for one of the most valuable companies in the world. If they can't deliver stable, high quality, easy to use software, while also meeting their goals, then they need to change their goals. >multicore CPUs >64-bit >"evolution of security and networking technologies" (?) >Swift >"unstable third party platforms" (?) >"whatever unknown things Apple has in the oven" Yeah none of these things are valid reasons to release broken software.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#374

Post by dredmorbius »

The narrow scope of accessibility on Apple desktops -- something I'd hope the company would be more concerned with as its most loyal and oldest users age -- is a similar shambles. This isn't something which (yet) affects me directly, though it does those around me. Some thoughts and observations ... for which Apple's own feedback dialog is too short to submit the whole piece:

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/BS-wilowvB4-dvPFL_VrUQ

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#375

Post by shmageggy »

mwfunk wrote: post #367

I blame the stock market pressure towards growth. The stock market rewards growth at the expense of everything else. It's like a kid pinching his arm to blow up a mosquito that was biting him- it's forced to grow and grow and grow until it pops. It's no longer acceptable to simply run a profitable business with happy employees and customers. It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter relea…

> Also, "success hides failure". If you're a titanically successful corporation, any internal argument along the lines of "we shouldn't do X anymore, we should do Y instead" can be shot down with "well, look at how successful we were while we were doing X! X must not be so bad after all." It degrades an organization's ability to be reflective and self-critical.

See: Kodak.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#376

Post by douche »

karlshea wrote: post #362
coldtea wrote: post #296

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…

> If anything things have got better, to the point where we complaint about trivial stuff. This is the key. We're definitely spoiled by how solid a lot of the basics are. I can fault them for some of the cloud service issues nowadays, but even those work better than they did in years past. Apple has always had strange hardware and software issues, just like everyone else. Just today I was trying to buy Windows 10 to…

Microsoft's OAuth stuff is ridiculously buggy. I've tried half a dozen times to get my Office 365 Microsoft account properly linked with my (identical email address) MSDN Microsoft account, and it's always wrong. Every time I go to login to some Microsoft OAuth site, it picks the wrong cookie, so I have to logout whatever account it thinks I'm using and login repeatedly with the right one.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#377

Post by leetNightshade »

vannevar wrote: post #352
jonknee wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't agree with great hardware, if we're talking about durability and easily fixable. At least the Macbook line seems designed to fail after a number of years or be too expensive to continue fixing in favor of buying a new one. Apple products, besides the high end desktops, seem disposable, no matter how well made it looks.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#378

Post by vacri »

addicted wrote: post #178
Alupis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iTunes was decent or even good You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out (until about 4.0?). Compared to its contemporaries, Music Match, which was a bloated piece of junk, and Winamp 2.x which while awesome, had a steep learning curve to get really useful (J for the win) and had an extremely unpleasant UI.

I had whatever version was around when the video ipods came around (and a bodgy bit of hardware that was). I couldn't sort videos the way I wanted to - itunes says that that file extension means "tv episode" instead of "movie"? Sorry, it's a tv episode. Not to mention the terrible UI with tiny targets that doesn't blend in with the user's desktop theming. Maybe that was v4+, but all I remember is hating to use itunes (including managing updates as already mentioned)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#379

Post by dingo_bat »

Osiris wrote: post #309

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.…

I'm not much of a mac user. I've never seen an OS crash since windows 7 arrived. Neither on windows (7, 8, 10) or on OSX. Are scenarios where the entire operating system crashes really occurring in significant numbers?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#380

Post by roymurdock »

mwfunk wrote: post #367

I blame the stock market pressure towards growth. The stock market rewards growth at the expense of everything else. It's like a kid pinching his arm to blow up a mosquito that was biting him- it's forced to grow and grow and grow until it pops. It's no longer acceptable to simply run a profitable business with happy employees and customers. It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter relea…

Pretty simple solution...if you don't want to be beholden to external shareholders, don't go public.

If you're pre IPO, fund your company through debt, which is extremely cheap at the moment with interest rates at historical lows, or sane, sustainable equity rounds through investors who you know and trust and are in it for the long haul.

If you're post IPO, pull a Dell and exit the public markets so you can refocus on core business ideas and long-term growth rather than spending time bickering with Carl Icahn and fighting market sentiment.

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