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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#391

Post by nostrademons »

Animats wrote: post #372

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,…

Nah, I think it's a perception problem.

As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better.

We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promises about how great things were going to be, really soon now.

The comparison with Microsoft is instructive. Microsoft software was even buggier than Apple's during their period of greatest dominance. Win95/Win98/WinME would crash all the time, and was an open barn door for security. Early versions of IE were pieces of shit. Even later versions of IE (6-9) were pieces of shit. Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them.

Apple's been driving change in the computer industry since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. New products are always buggy - the amount of work involved in building up a product category from scratch is massive, and you don't know how they'll be received by the market, so there're frantic changes and dirty hacks needed to adapt on the fly, and they often invalidate whole architectural assumptions. It's just that most of the time, this work goes on when nobody's paying attention, and so by the time people notice you, you've had a chance to iron out a lot of the kinks. Apple is in the unenviable position of trying to introduce new product categories while the whole world is looking.

The Apple Watch is buggy as hell, but I still find it useful, and pretty cool.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#392

Post by douche »

vacri wrote: post #387
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #281

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!

> Windows scatters files all over the place! Oh look, OSX has touched this usb stick, and vomited it's dotfiles onto it. Did it ever write to the stick? Nope, just need to throw those trash dotfiles onto every. single. thing. it. sees.

Grr. You can always tell when somebody has been on the NAS or done any development work on a branch checked out of source control on a MacBook...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#393

Post by gearoidoc »

jonknee wrote: post #139
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.

iLife was very important to Steve, he dedicated a lot of time demoing the apps on stage. He was a huge fan of ripping out all the features of iMovie. Same with iTunes (which has gotten a ton of criticism over the years), he was the one that kept cramming everything under the sun into it. I don't know if he was as passionate about X Code, but he sure liked to brag about having the best development environment. Interfa…

Interface Builder is superb once you get the hang of it.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#394

Post by spinlock »

ProAm wrote: post #389
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…

> I blame the stock market pressure towards growth This is because almost everyone's retirement fund/401k/IRA is now directly tied to the stock market in one form or another. There are no more pensions, so people need growth in order to retire and live a reasonable life in your last years.

There are still pensions and they are also tied to the stock market. Pension funds also have greater influence over CEOs and they need growth every quarter because they are so underfunded (i.e. most pension funds are capitalized based on extremely unreasonable expectations of stock market growth).

So, the reality is that pension funds exert a much greater pressure on CEOs to create short term gains than individual investors who -- incongruously -- take a longer view.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#395

Post by gherkin0 »

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.

> I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality.

I'd say they need to fix the features they've implemented, and only release new features when they're fully cooked.

Removing features is terrible: it is not an improvement to me when my stuff breaks or when I'm forced into a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator use-case.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#396

Post by Animats »

sandworm101 wrote: post #384
Animats wrote: post #372

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,…

>>> Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong? Nothing. And that is the problem. When you are generally speaking doing everything well there is little room for massive improvement. The days of perpetually exponential improvement, and resulting growth, are over. Apple is not a startup. Like Ford, Sony and GE, they now have…

Apple is losing market share to Android. The gravy train may not go on forever. Apple today is in the position of GM in GM's glory days, the wonderful days of powerful V8 engines, HydraMatic transmissions, tailfins, and the "longer, lower, wider" wide-track Pontiac. GM didn't think they needed massive improvement in quality. They were wrong.

Watch this commercial for the 1967 Pontiac GTO.[1] Looks a little like one of Apple's teaser ads from the Jobs era, doesn't it?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzF_CdKLTP0

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#397

Post by Scaevolus »

Animats wrote: post #372

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,…

Apple's R&D budget seems to be mostly focused on hardware. It's hard to say definitively, given how secretive they are.

Microsoft invests a massive amount of money into MSR, and creates tools out of the most useful results. The Static Driver Verifier depends on Z3, an SMT solver developed at MSR. Other verification tooling like SAL (C/C++ annotations to assert contracts for functions) has a similar history.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#398

Post by wcummings »

ProAm wrote: post #389
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…

> I blame the stock market pressure towards growth This is because almost everyone's retirement fund/401k/IRA is now directly tied to the stock market in one form or another. There are no more pensions, so people need growth in order to retire and live a reasonable life in your last years.

Pensions weren't/aren't invested in the market similarly to 401k's?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#399

Post by martin1975 »

This is for entertainment purposes only type of question - what if they moved just the desktop to Linux instead of OS X and port Cocoa atop Wayland? Leave the mobile stuff on iOS, which it seems it's good for.

This is the kind of revolutionary thinking Jobs had when he went OS 9 -> OS X... could Linux set them free on the desktop by open sourcing the desktop OS X?

I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but there's bits of OS X I like...and bits of Linux I like, as far as technology, architecture, speed, GUI frameworks... like some combo of the two would be a killer OS for the ages and open source too.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#400

Post by theandrewbailey »

Apocryphon wrote: post #370
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…

There's been much talk about the "financialization of everything"[1], but how did it come to this? What change in laws, what shift in culture, produced this growth at all costs mentality? HFT? The Reagan Revolution? Moving manufacturing offshore? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983

Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, companies started optimizing for maximum shareholder value; everything else be damned. HFT and offshoring manufacturing were deliberate effects of it.
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