Apple’s declining software quality • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#441

Post by zwischenzug » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #111

zwischenzug wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iTunes was hideous. I once tried to reverse engineer the XML that stored the library and concluded it must have been designed by a distracted intern.

Why reverse-engineer? The format (known as "Apple XML property list") has always been openly documented: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/... There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages. The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like bina…

Right, so technical debt then.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#442

Post by pwthornton » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:17 PM UTC

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,…

As someone who regularly uses OS X and Windows, I'd say OS X is as reliable as Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 or even more reliable, particularly with regards to crashes. Apple did have a really annoying wifi bug that has been fixed but that did take awhile.

iOS is also in pretty good shape, but almost every time Apple releases a new version its buggy. By now, iOS 9 it's a very stable and robust OS, but it needed work up front.

The biggest places were Apple is having trouble are with new products. Watch OS was slow, buggy and limited at release. It's pretty much at a 1.0 state right now. The new Apple TV is by far the best version of the Apple TV, but the OS is buggy and still needs refinement.

My take on this is two-fold:

1) Apple is doing more and more products, causing there to be issues with newer products. They haven't been putting in the QA work on newer software. OS X is old and mature software, so it's pretty stable, but something like Watch OS is very new.

2) Apple's insistence on yearly OS upgrades is causing there to be a lot of 1.0 roughness each year. Just slowing down to a two-year cycle would allow for a lot more time to refine and more time where the OS has been patched and is the latest OS. iOS 10 will be announced in a few months, but iOS 9 still has at least one major point update to go.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#443

Post by natural219 » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

"This is a blank problem. No, this is a blank problem."

I don't think there is, in fact, a "problem" that can be "solved" to return Apple to the glorious design thought leader status we all know and love. The "problem" is that Steve Jobs is dead, and his unique talent was coordinating a huge number of talented designers/programmers/businesspeople to passionately care about meticulous levels of detail in product design.

At this point, the board-meeting-and-shareholder conversation will continue listing the problems with Apple's "management" or "perception" or "process" or whatever. Their efforts are entirely futile.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#444

Post by pwthornton » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

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…

OS X and iOS are both way more stable than any pre-OS X Apple OS. I can't believe people forget it.

When people talk about OS X having issues, they often mean some new feature is a little flaky. Classic Mac OS lacked basic stability and security features like preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Classic Mac OS was just like the pre-NT Windows: crash prone.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#445

Post by ethbro » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

VeilEm wrote: post #439

digi_owl wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd assume parent was thinking less of PC users and more of other OS consumers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#446

Post by abakker » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

bsbechtel wrote: post #250

abakker wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its interesting to think about - is feature creep uniquely in the domain of software? I don't think so. There is plenty of software that has been immune to it (think everyday developer tools, command line stuff, etc). Often the apps with the least amount of feature creep are the ones where they are bounded by the APIs they talk to, i.e. if the API (which they don't control) is static, they can't really add any more f…

I think it boils down to asking what the product is actually for, or rather, what fundamental human need does it solve? That's a rather tough answer for computers, but for cars it's easy - getting from point A to point B. Every modification to a car is in pursuit of either making the job more efficient or making the job easier/more comfortable for the customer. I think the fact that the answer is so tough for compute…

This is very good point. The constraints are in the mind of the customer, but also in the UI. i.e. a panorama viewing app is not great in vertical orientation on an iPhone. There are physical as well as mental constraints in the UI of a computer.

On the topic of cars, it is true that modifications strive toward comfort, but they also strive for marketability. While a leather-wrapped dashboard may be comfortable to look at, it is primarily focused at adding something to market. This same phenomenon exhibits in software, where features are added to increase marketability, "Look! this ERP software has a social network built in!". The utility of a given feature is often perspective-based, especially when the user is not well aware of their actual needs, or the user and purchaser are not the same person.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#447

Post by jsz0 » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

> If anything things have got better

Much better in my opinion. For example they've fixed all the issues with iMessage interoperability on OSX/iOS. There are a time when if you used Messages on the Mac you had to suffer through missing messages, duplicate messages, out-of-order messages, etc. Now, as far as I can tell, it's working flawlessly. Even better that it now includes SMS messages.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#448

Post by _yosefk » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

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,…

Microsoft indeed improved quality a lot, though Windows 7 inexplicably grinds to a halt and sometimes outright hangs on my desktop occasionally (one can blame my Wacom tablet but that contradicts the thesis of driver verification working wonders), and Windows 8 periodically renders the laptop unusable, using near-100% of the disk bandwidth (I tried like 5 tweaks recommended on the web for this problem, nothing helped.)

But that is not nearly as bad compared to having to rely on software developed the way they do in the aerospace business! From http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/02/09/public-tv-figu...:

> Who crashed Colgan 3407? Actually the autopilot did. … The airplane had all of the information necessary to prevent this crash. The airspeed was available in digital form. The power setting was available in digital form. The status of the landing gear was available in digital form. …

> How come the autopilot software on this $27 million airplane wasn’t smart enough to fly basically sensible attitudes and airspeeds? Partly because FAA certification requirements make it prohibitively expensive to develop software or electronics that go into certified aircraft. It can literally cost $1 million to make a minor change. Sometimes the government protecting us from small risks exposes us to much bigger ones.

(I agree that Apple's cash hoard does not make $1M sound like a lot, however, they also have much more software to tend to.) Overall, it seems that today you have to trade correctness for features and development time, and the cost in features and development time cannot be borne by a market participant unless the market is regulated so that all competitors have to do it, in which case the user is going to get way, way less functionality. I believe that the cost of bulletproof correctness might drop significantly enough at some point to change the game - and I really, really hope formal methods will take off big time, without being sure they can - but it doesn't seem like we're there yet. (This is my opinion, not data, of course; the one thing that I think $millions buy that works very well without costing too much time or features is automated testing.)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#449

Post by at-fates-hands » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

If that brand name is tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what consumer would buy a car from the brand?

This.

I would never buy a car from Apple, EVER. You make computers, not cars. It would be like Ford suddenly making a PC, how stupid does that sound? Ford would be the laughing stock of the tech industry. But for some reason since a decent computer hardware company thinks they need to get into cars, they think people are going to buy it?

This is the sort of delusional thinking that makes companies go bankrupt.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#450

Post by reitanqild » Thu, Feb 04, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

elliotec wrote: post #435

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…

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.

Are you missing an /s tag there or am I temporarily dumb?