Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#511

Post by getnormality »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #507
bondolo wrote: post #390

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all…

> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. This rings especially true with Windows. There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs. This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to exces…

Apple can stay far ahead simply by not falling even faster than Windows. Finder and Spotlight have gotten worse, but they remain light-years ahead of their Windows counterparts.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#512

Post by neilv »

cageface wrote: post #485
bondolo wrote: post #390

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all…

You can really see this when trying to build apps with Swift & SwiftUI. The language and the framework seem to be optimized for nice terse WWDC demos but both fall apart pretty quickly when you start to do any heavy UI lifting with them. And I think that's starting to bleed into their own native UI now too. The lousy macOS settings app is a good example. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to A…

Yes, I was a fairly early SwiftUI guinea pig, when I'd mistakenly assumed it was solid because of how Apple was pushing it, and your "WWDC demo" is spot-on.

The DSL could've been better (while still syncing between code and direct-manipulation GUI painter). And the interaction model seemed like it wasn't to be trusted, and was probably buggy (and others confirmed bugs). The lack of documentation on some entitlements APIs being demoed as launched left me shouting very bad words on multiple days (which is not something I normally do) before I made everything work.

I could feel this, and ended up wrapping all my UI with a carefully hand-implemented hierarchical statechart, so that the app would work in the field for our needs, the first time, and every time. Normally, for consumer-grade work, I would just use the abstractions of the interface toolkit, and not have to formally model it separately.

Don't get me started on what a transparently incompetent load of poo some of the Apple developer Web sites were, for complying with the additional burdens that Apple places on developers, just because it can. Obvious rampant data consistency problems, poor HCI design, and just plain unreliable behavior. I think I heard that at least some of that had been outsourced, to one of those consulting firms that everyone knows isn't up to doing anything competently, but that somehow gets contracts anyway.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#513

Post by tkgally »

flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

I wasn’t able to replicate that bug on my Mac, but when I tried to do so I ran into an instance of another bug that has been annoying me for many years: windows that open far away on the screen from where I clicked. Here is where the color picker appeared on my screen after I clicked on the custom color button in the change wallpaper window:

https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jp...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#514

Post by rangestransform »

I'm not sure if anyone else experiences this but there's a bug in the display settings where:

- high resolution high refresh rate display (max res and refresh rate are higher than DP1.2 bandwidth)

- attached to dock through DP

- macbook lid is closed and plugged into dock

the attached display defaults to the highest resolution, even though it's unsupported by TB3. This leads to a black screen. Changing the resolution by opening the lid doesn't fix this because closing the lid will return the external display to the default resolution.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#515

Post by WatchDog »

sureIy wrote: post #397
WatchDog wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last experience with iTunes was a long long time ago, in the iPod days, when you needed to use it to sync music, but it was a horrible piece of software back then.

Did you use it on Windows? I never understood the hate for iTunes. It was a dream for someone like me who'd spend hours customizing their library. A far cry from today's software from Apple. In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.

Yes, I used it on windows, I also spent lots of time curating my music library, but I mostly used winamp for that.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#516

Post by jaffa2 »

Here's a weird bug. If you have on your iphone, photo slide show (i had it set to cities and nature), and then with a charger wire in then just try to use your phone, the touch digitizer goes crazy, as if there's some weird interference. Switch back to a standard wallpaper mode, and the problem goes away. iphone 14pro

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#517

Post by matt_kantor »

kazinator wrote: post #417

My work Macbook sometimes drops random characters from the lock screen password input. You hit a key and a black dot does not appear; the password is consequently rejected. It's not exactly this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/458099/macos-lock-... The system is not lagging at all. It's not this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/08/29/mac-wont-accept-correct-l... It's a bit like this, but only for the system p…

This one affects me too. It's maddening.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#518

Post by [deleted] »

ethbr1 wrote: post #448
_aavaa_ wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling . I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…

For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore? I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues. PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#519

Post by genewitch »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #507
bondolo wrote: post #390

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all…

> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. This rings especially true with Windows. There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs. This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to exces…

Can you upload a video showing exactly what you mean by explorer is sluggish?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#520

Post by yndoendo »

herpdyderp wrote: post #504
dandellion wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the feeling. I'm forced to use a Mac laptop for work, and it's really made me appreciate Linux.

I was forced to use a Linux laptop for a work once. It actually managed to make me appreciate Windows!

You have to pay me to run Windows bare metal. The user experience is terrible and of the lowest quality compared to Mac OS and Linux. Even Windows OS 11 IoT LTSC requires work around to not create a Microsoft account, and this is their embedded solution.

Last week I spent a whole day trying to resurrect a Windows 10 IoT LTSC because of a corrupt WMI repository. It crashed out software and to the client it looks like our software is bad where it is the OS that is bad. Client's automation was down until a replacement was sent out and installed.

I've had to implement number of software changes because of buggy Windows drivers. From Intel NICs to touch screen HID messaging. Microsoft talks about backwards capability but it is subjective and only truly bound to the most used applications. Enabling tablet mode on Windows will break their API.

There has never been a Linux system I couldn't resurrect and keep working. With Windows, it is always re-install the OS and all applications. Even the laptop I'm writing this on is the same OS installation that has passed between 4 different computers. You cannot get that quality of OS installation from Microsoft.

Took me a month to convince IT to reinstall Windows on my work laptop. Microsoft's update broke the QA VM environment and would freeze with an infinite loop. Uninstalling the update nor repairing the OS did anything to fix their issues.

Even today I experienced Ctrl+X is broken and does not work in Visual Studio for the git comment text box entry.

Post reply on HN