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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#491

Post by st3v3r »

douche wrote: post #392
vacri wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

The development work thing isn't the fault of Apple, but rather the stupid developer who didn't pay attention to their commit.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#492

Post by MarkyC4 »

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.

9 women combined can't make a baby in 1 month

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#493

Post by lunula »

spinlock wrote: post #403
graeme wrote: 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…

It's funny, I was just regretting the latest OSX update that I made. My MacBook Pro (work laptop) is 2 years old and was great when I first set up my dev environment. Now, I need to restart every couple of days. I should spend some time partitioning the disk and installing Linux.

> I should spend some time partitioning the disk and installing Linux.

That hour spent might save you twenty. But if you want the best experience you need a laptop that was certified for OEM Linux, like some of the Lenovo boxes. The user experience is better than a macbook. Rock solid OS. Everything just works. Seamless upgrades. A bunch of warm hearted people will carefully apply themselves to making the system work better while you sleep.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#494

Post by hueving »

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.

HFT has absolutely nothing to do with maximizing shareholder value.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#495

Post by elsurudo »

nostrademons wrote: post #427
Animats wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I think that the Apple/Google/Microsoft/IBM quadrifecta perfectly illustrates one of the lesser-known points of The Innovator's Dilemma : customers care about different values in different points of the product's lifecycle, and that leads to differing companies becoming dominant. When a new product category is introduced, customers primarily care about ease of use and relevance to their lives. Radical vertical integr…

Thanks, that was a really interesting read. However, like my sibling states, consumer markets are subject to the whims of marketing, which may distort this somewhat.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#496

Post by outworlder »

melted wrote: post #486
KirinDave wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's because Skylake is buggy as hell. It's a bit of a bummer. MS cannot publicly blame Intel for the raft of skylake bugs, but it's first gen hardware, first gen software, and first-gen firmware. For what it's worth, my Surface Book (obviously a product they care a lot about) has basically gotten to a crash rate equal to my mac, which is maybe 1 actual problem every 2 weeks). I suspect the Surface 4 Pro…

You should take your Mac to the store and have them take a look. Or at least run hardware diagnostics. I've been using Macs for well over a decade and in that time I have maybe seen 4-5 crashes total, across multiple laptops and desktops. A crash every two weeks is not a normal situation in OS X.

Depends on what you are doing.

Just yesterday, OSX was convinced that I had an external monitor. I did, but that was 2 hours back when I was at the office. So I got to the preferences screen and.. the kernel crashed.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#497

Post by st3v3r »

zanny wrote: post #319
HillaryBriss wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For programming especially, yes. I can see that point. IMHO, an Android programmer in particular will find OSX more comfortable and supportive than Windows because Android Studio and drivers and stuff mostly _just work_ on a Mac. Example: get adb to talk to a Kindle Fire from your windows machine and then do that same thing from your Mac Example: install genymotion on your Windows machine and fiddle around with Virtu…

As someone running Arch, I have no idea how devs can put up with OSX or Windows. Both are awful, both you cannot fix yourself, and both get in the way all the time of what you want to do. For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away. If I need development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well, and I can super fast insert my patches and get what I need immediately. No updates or an…

"Both are awful"

Personal opinion. Most Linux GUIs are awful to me.

"both you cannot fix yourself"

Moot point, as the vast majority of people, even tech oriented people, wouldn't do that if they could.

"and both get in the way all the time of what you want to do."

Again, completely depends on your personal workflow.

"For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away."

Mac App Store, Fink, or Homebrew.

"If I need development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well"

Git works just fine on OS X.

"No updates or any of this insanity stand in my way"

Except for, what you just mentioned, which are updates.

"We just got Linux 4.4 yesterday, and I booted today and kept on rolling as per usual."

Same thing happens with OS X updates.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#498

Post by st3v3r »

pjmlp wrote: post #276
HillaryBriss wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For programming especially, yes. I can see that point. IMHO, an Android programmer in particular will find OSX more comfortable and supportive than Windows because Android Studio and drivers and stuff mostly _just work_ on a Mac. Example: get adb to talk to a Kindle Fire from your windows machine and then do that same thing from your Mac Example: install genymotion on your Windows machine and fiddle around with Virtu…

I develop on Windows and don't see the value on such examples. Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices. There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far. I will become productive with Android Studio the day they are able to match what I already had with Ant, ndk-build and Eclipse ADT/CDT in terms of IDE/build performance and C++ support. Keyboard shortcuts are the least…

"Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices."

Genymotion is miles and miles ahead of HAXM. Real Devices are best, though. But using real devices is much easier on OS X, due to not having to even think about drivers. I had to use Windows at a big corporate gig for a while, and that was one of the absolute worst parts of it: drivers.

"There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far."

It's pretty pervasive. Just about any major library is in git. Most projects are using git, too.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#499

Post by [deleted] »

lunula wrote: post #484
VeilEm wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't know about Linux influencing Microsoft on the desktop, but surely it has lit it up on the server. You are 100% trolling by claiming 0.02% of PC folks use Linux. It is at least two orders of magnitude higher than that, and then android... :)

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#500

Post by perlpimp »

bluedino wrote: post #414
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…

>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio... Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that). I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers…

I regularly get asked to fix someones windows PC, no such problem with people who have Macs. With OS X there are waves of releases(major versions) if I remember correctly - some introduce swaths of new code/features/replacement code. Some other are more of a speedup and bugfix versions. Maybe I'm wrong.
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