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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#511

Post by anonbanker »

Microsoft started declining first, back with Windows Vista (7 was pretty much a bugfix). Apple lost it's way when Forestall was booted (regardless of what you think about skeumorphism).

While this is all happening, Linux's software quality continues to rise. KDE Plasma 5.5 is beautiful and stable. GNOME 3.18 is Stable and very useable. XFCE, Mate, and Enlightenment are rock stable.

This isn't new; During KDE 4.x, Microsoft directly ripped off KDE's first plasma interface for Windows 7. Before Vista was released, They were showing off wobbly windows in demos, weeks after it was first accomplished in the Compiz window manager for GNOME (now part of Unity).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#512

Post by mrich »

MarkyC4 wrote: post #492
petersellers wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That just means involving more people _right now_ won't speed things up. But you can "make 9 babies in 9 months" if you plan early and involve enough people. I.e. know how much Q/A people you need and hire them upfront.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#513

Post by nostrademons »

petra wrote: post #471
nostrademons wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems like a good description of product maturity process in B2B markets. But consumers are motivated by different things(once products are good enough) - the chief among them is psychological/social value/perception, mostly created via marketing or by being first - and in general pretty hard to disrupt.

I think that the emotional-value aspect slows down the disruption cycle in consumer markets, but it doesn't stop it.

Emotions, after all, are just the brain's way of processing lots and lots of information that can't be compared on a rational basis. Part of that information is "What do my friends use?", part of it is "How does it fit into my life?", and part of it is "What does it say about me as a person and what I value?"

But all of those factors are still subject to reality: if a new product comes out that fits into your life better, eventually somebody's going to break ranks and adopt it, and they'll be able to explain to their friends, authentically, why they believe it's better. All of the catalysts I mentioned in the original post reflect changes in the ecosystem: the shift from ease-of-use to features & compatibility reflects more things you can do with the product, the shift from features to reliability reflects using the product in more consequential situations, and the shift from reliability to branding & maintenance reflects how you're perceived for choosing the product.

The Tipping Point describes the mechanism for this in consumer markets well. Product adoption starts off with Mavens, people who like trying & evaluating new technology on its own merits. It spreads through Connectors, who have a wide circle of friends and enjoy telling them about interesting new things that might benefit their life. Finally, the holdouts are convinced by Salespersons who explain, point-by-point the benefits and answer objections.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#514

Post by r00fus »

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.

Some combination of (Windows on VMWare, startup utilities,corporate virus/malware protection tool and external monitors) are my bane.

I've given up keeping VMWare open, and I experience very very few issues - even on an older OSX release (again, due to corp IT).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#515

Post by e40 »

e40 wrote: post #316

For me, this is a great example of what we're talking about: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7257238?tstart=0 ""Disk Not Ejected Properly" error after EL Capitan goes to sleep and wakes up again." It's because of things like this that I usually wait until the .4 release to upgrade. El Cap is at .3 and I'm feeling stupid for breaking my rule.

Btw, disabling "power nap" made the problem go away.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#516

Post by st3v3r »

jernfrost wrote: post #81

While I think this is exaggerated I also think there is truth to it. I would not blame this on inability to make quality products but bad high level choices. What is xCode today used to be multiple separate apps. The synch process for iPhone used to be separate programs. Now we are getting these huge monolithic programs like xCode and iTunes. Making big monoliths just isn't good software engineering IMHO. They should…

"I think xCode e.g. which I use every day could easily be made into 3 different programs. 1) Project management and configuration. One program where you define which pieces go into your project. How they are compiled, deployed etc. 2) An Editor component which does syntax highlighting, refactoring, code navigation etc. 3) A GUI designer."

We used to have that. The GUI designer being separate was never a good situation, considering how one would connect the IBOutlets and IBActions.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#518

Post by anonbanker »

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…

Windows handles maybe an eighth of the hardware that works in Linux.

Visual Studio is nice, if you're not writing in Rust, Perl 6, Ruby, Objective C, D, Scala, Smalltalk...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#519

Post by sakopov »

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,…

I don't know if it's fair to compare Microsoft's efforts with Windows and Apple's with OSX. Windows runs on hardware from a variety of different vendors. OSX is pretty much commercially locked down to Apple's own hardware (unless i'm missing something?). It's actually a shame that it isn't damn hear flawless.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#520

Post by Aloha »

pwthornton wrote: post #442
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…

This is more or less my take - other than some occasional high profile bugs - I'm not sure Apple has a declining problem, their software seems to still be well above industry norms for quality (and either in line or better than Microsoft, largely because of their strategy to abandon backwards compatibility).

Apple however is held to a much higher standard than they've ever met, and much higher again than industry norms - and you raise very valid points that they're shipping shit before its ready, I don't think yearly upgrades are terribly compelling anymore, or really needed - I want a computer that works really well and does the things that I want it to do, with a minimum amount of fuss.

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