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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#51

Post by koralatov »

ebbv wrote: post #33
koralatov wrote: post #12

It feels a little clichéd to say it, but I do feel that Snow Leopard, outdated now as it is, was some kind of fortuitous confluence of factors that resulted in OS X being as close to perfect as it's ever been. Even putting aside the iOS-style elements being added, my experience has been that each version of OS X has been slightly worse than the last, and tends to introduce strange little anomalies and instabilities o…

I think you have rose colored glasses about Snow Leopard. It had plenty of bugs and hiccups. People deride the "iOS style" features of El Capitan but first, what specifically are you referring to besides Launcher? Do you think adding Notifications to OS X is bad? I find them extremely useful, and like the integration better than the spotty support Growler had among third party software. I never use Launcher but it's…

I don't have a particular issue with any of the iOS stuff ported over, but it's a lament I hear quite frequently from other Mac users.

You're right that there's a certain amount of rose-tinting with regards to Snow Leopard. It certainly wasn't perfect, and I wouldn't really want to switch back to it; the world has moved on since then, and SL isn't really competitive as a primary OS now.

With that said, though, my use-case in OS X hasn't dramatically changed since Snow Leopard --- mostly web-browsing, some IM, using the Terminal for various tasks --- but OS X's stability has changed in that time, for the worse. Apps crash more often, the OS itself is generally less stable and prone to random freezes which require a hard-restart. Doing a fresh install didn't fix these issues, and my fianceé's MacBook has them too, which makes me think it's not just hardware issues.

I think what I'm really looking for is Snow El Capitan: a year where nothing new is added and Apple throw intense focus on fixing the various weirdnesses that are introduced during their breakneck release cycle.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#52

Post by itbeho »

sdegutis wrote: post #2

Apple has been declining since about 2011 not only in software quality, but also in hardware quality, in innovating hardware, and in innovating software. When I got my first Mac, it had Mac OS X Tiger on it, and everything about it really felt like it had the user in mind. These days everything about using it feels like it has shareholders in mind. The features being added seem like the kind of things you'd have exec…

I've experienced a similar issue with song removal. I've also had to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally delete a few old apps that kept coming back after being deleted as well.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#53

Post by galad87 »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #24
sdegutis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QuickTime was always way ahead of the game in terms of playing videos with a fantastic user interface. They kept innovating the UI so that it would get out of your way while still letting you do the basic things people need to do to watch a video. Even today I feel like QT is one of Apple's non-failures. The only thing I don't like about it is that you can't easily rewind a few seconds backwards. It requires a really…

> you can't easily rewind a few seconds backwards There is a technical reason for this, and it's not a QT program problem, but rather a QT container problem. The QT container file does a horrendous job at synchronizing audio and visual streams. QT playback software exploits this problem, though, by intentionally lagging the start of a video by a few frames in order for the audio and visual streams to match up on the…

That's not true at all. QuickTime container can represent each frame timestamp exactly, and it has got some advanced features like edit lists. Every frame has got a start and stop time, and each sync sample is marked as such, it's even possible to mark on which sample each sample depends. In Matroska for example the stop time is so unreliable you often have to analyse the frame content or wait for the next frame to know the duration of a sample, and who knows if the sync flag is true or not.

You are probably referring to the delay introduced by b-frames, but the mov container has got a atom ('cslg') to store the max and min offsets and put everything in sync again.

Unfortunately third party mov demuxers don't support cslg or edit lists, so they only supports the simplest mov files.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#54

Post by ATsch »

ssharp wrote: post #36
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…

OSX doesn't need to handle that many hardware and driver issues, so I don't see how that's relevant to a Windows comparison. I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux. And I'd say Windows had far more issues t…

Regarding your last point about many people not knowing what XCode is: I assume GP was theorizing that Apple's declining software quality is related or even in part caused by their bad development environment and tools, compared to competitiors.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#56

Post by xkcd-sucks »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #41

Cache since server is currently overwhelmed: ---- Software quality is a nebulous and divisive topic. There are many parameters to software quality – reliability, speed, user experience, design, discoverability, and more – and a move towards any of these virtues leads to sacrifices in others, especially on a limited time schedule. Additionally, a number of forces influence software quality over time, like accommodatin…

Nice job formatting that...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#57

Post by partiallypro »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #7

While I agree that Apple's software quality has declined in recent years, I fear that their hardware and other advantages (even with superior hardware and software I don't trust a Google-or-Amazon-based phone for a second to be anything but a data mine for them), I fear Apple's existing lead in general quality will allow them to become (remain?) complacent and allow things to slide.

I don't even know if Apple owns the hardware quality title anymore. The Surface line from Microsoft is astounding in quality, and it's only a few generations old. This latest line did have some bugs (mostly due to Intel,) but overall when I walk into a Best Buy, and I feel a Surface Book and look over at a MacBook, one feels like the future, while one feels like it's hugging the past.

The problem with Apple, and I've said this for ages, is that Apple is fashion. It's a status symbol, Sony used to be that same way, and look at it now. It had similar business verticals, pushed the same proprietary nonsense instead of adopting what the rest of the industry is doing and they were drowned as they began to expand their portfolio of devices.

Apple makes great quality devices, but Apple also enjoys massive hardware margins. Hardware margins diminish with time, no company has successfully escaped it. So the question is, at what point does Apple go out of style?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#58

Post by kps »

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…

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.”

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#59

Post by jonknee »

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…

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.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#60

Post by Bud »

ixtli wrote: post #49

I'm glad someone has written about this because it's something I've noticed over the past few OSX major releases. The interesting thing is that speed and stability appear to have been getting better for my use cases. However for the first time in my 20 years as an Apple user, this has been at the expense of visual fidelity. Both iOS and OS X seem to be slightly "glitchier" and applications end up in bad states where…

Not to be a stickler, but this particular part of the discussion seems unfair to me. Application bugs should be blamed on the app developer, not on OS X. (Unless, of course, it's one of Apple's built-in apps.)
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