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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#431

Post by petersellers »

bluedino wrote: post #410
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 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. They don't have the time, however.

They have the money to buy more resources and a lot of those tasks can be done in parallel.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#432

Post by biot »

addicted wrote: post #346
biot wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you contradicting yourself? If post-Jobs they only pay lip service to quality but with Jobs they actually took action, doesn't that suggest Jobs may have been a positive influence on quality?

I think the action they take is about the same. They pay more lip service these days. I wouldn't be surprised if they are actually putting more work into better quality these days, but stuff is just more complex (e.g., everything is cloud based. Imagine OSX today, except running MobileMe, .Mac, etc. as the cloud backend instead of iCloud, which while it has its issues, is way better than those disasters).

Ah ok... maybe you have a different usage, but "lip service" is used to indicate "all talk, no action". So paying more lip service to something means they're churning out more empty words without the activity to back it up.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#433

Post by digi_owl »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #400
Apocryphon wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set

While done from a UK perspective, I think part 2 and 3 takes a trip over the Atlantic.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#434

Post by digi_owl »

shmageggy wrote: post #375
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.

Innovators dilemma i think the official term is.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#435

Post by elliotec »

nostrademons wrote: post #391
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 promis…

I agree with this sentiment. We can complain all day, but the fact that we have these devices and software that have been made accessible to us by Apple is astounding from a historical perspective. My parents are in awe of the calendar app, and apple maps, etc. As they should be!

OSX also is still the best development platform despite it's flaws.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#436

Post by NicoJuicy »

digi_owl wrote: post #430
nostrademons wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 promis…

> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them. Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement. The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software. If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already throw…

Not exactly, oem pc's have ( mostly ) an oem version of Windows on it ( which is pretty cheap, don't know what other incentives microsoft has though).

But you can install Linux on it for sure :)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#437

Post by herbturbo »

coldtea wrote: post #296
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…

> 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…

> The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language).

Xcode 3/4 were a lot harder to work with (IB and Instruments separate, had to use Clang on command line etc), but I don't recall them being particularly buggy. Xcode 7 with Swift is the buggiest version I have used. It crashes on me 10+ times a day with all of the instant compiler checks it does. The progression from 3 to 7 is amazing, but I feel it has come at the cost of stability.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#438

Post by thenewwazoo »

coldtea wrote: post #304
kps wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7. I'd always assumed it was simply that Apple no longer cared about computers; in Jobs' own words, “milk the Macintosh for all it's worth and get busy on the next great thing.”

> 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…

I'll take a crack at that:

- UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond.

- Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.

- Mouse pointer lag: Probably related to the input lag above, the trackpad will not respond for multiple seconds after I begin touching it. If I "wake" it with a two-finger scroll, it will often lose half the input and instead click.

- AirPlay stuttering: even two ethernet-wired systems will still lose data between them. It's a crappy experience.

- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.

- Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.

That's just off the top of my head. Many of these have followed me between OS X revisions and different hardware. It amazes me that such bugs stick around.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#439

Post by VeilEm »

digi_owl wrote: post #430
nostrademons wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 promis…

> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them. Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement. The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software. If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already throw…

> They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass.

I have my doubts that all 0.02% or whatever of PC users who are dedicated to using Linux as their desktop OS influenced Microsoft to do anything but if you have data to show otherwise I'd be interested in it.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#440

Post by nardi »

petersellers wrote: post #431
bluedino wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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. They don't have the time, however.

They have the money to buy more resources and a lot of those tasks can be done in parallel.

There's this really great book you should read about myths and man-months
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