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Apple’s declining software quality

sudophilosophical.com

531–540 of 723 posts

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#531
post #479

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…

If Microsoft was serious about enhancing the real and perceived quality of the brand they are establishing with the Surface Pro line (which seems to be very nice based on the my mother's earlier generation model), they should have tested Skylake, and it in the Surface Pro 4 prototypes, detected the problem, and delayed the launch. Intel's problem became their's when they shipped it in their hardware.

As an engineer,this is the correct response.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it was a statement by you about your own actions, saying he thinks you are wrong in that wording is calling you a liar. It could, and I think should , have been worded differently if the intent was to probe whether you were being hyperbolic or mistaken. E.g. "I'm not sure how someone would go about not using any Apple app, such as calculator, camera, clock, contacts, messages, phone, photos, safari. Do you not…

Lying means you believe X but say Y. If you believe Y, say Y, but the fact is X, that's not lying.

I didn't say he lied, I said he was called a liar (but really, it's more that the strong implication was that he lied, that was overly strong wording on my part). Specifically, I think the wording "I find that hard to believe" has different connotations depending on whether you are talking to the root source of some information, or someone relaying that information.

For example, if I state "I had chicken for lunch" and you reply "I find that hard to believe.", I think the implication is clear that you think I'm lying. Alternatively, if a third party says "kbenson had chicken for lunch" and you say "I find that hard to believe", there is not a clear implication that the third party is lying, nor that where they got the information from is lying, as there are multiple locations in the chain of authenticity of such a statement where a mistake or purposeful misrepresentation could have happened, so it's not clear where fault may lay.

So, when someone states "I don't use any of the default iPhone apps" and another person replies directly to them with "I find that hard to believe", I think the implication that they are lying is clear (whether or not they were actually lying).

Now, as for your specific assertion, I think you are obviously correct in the general sense. Although am interested in your opinion on how you would classify someone that is very loose with regard to their statements and their certainty regarding those statements. If I made a statement asserting something, but thought there might be a 15% chance I was wrong if I really looked into it, would I be lying if I stated it as a fact due to the false certainty implied?

Specifically, in this case, if the author was 85% certain they didn't use any default Apple apps and stated as much without qualifying with "I think", or "probably", they may believe they are correct, but be ultimately wrong. Was it a lie to imply a higher level of certainty than existed? I'm not entirely sure how I would classify that. (Note: I don't mean to imply a specific state of mind for the original commenter, this is purely a thought experiment and that statement was handy).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#533
post #367

I blame the stock market pressure towards growth. The stock market rewards growth at the expense of everything else. It's like a kid pinching his arm to blow up a mosquito that was biting him- it's forced to grow and grow and grow until it pops. It's no longer acceptable to simply run a profitable business with happy employees and customers. It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter relea…

> I blame the stock market pressure towards growth.

Every capitalist mechanism insists on growth. That's literally what capital is.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#534
post #514
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Lucky you, VMWare is getting rid of Fusion anyway.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, oem pc's have ( mostly ) an oem version of Windows on it ( which is pretty cheap, don't know what other incentives microsoft has though). But you can install Linux on it for sure :)

Yep, sure can. https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/vendor/Lenovo?s...

Mostly ;)

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A565108%2Cp_n_o...

(amazon shop --Laptop -- PC )

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#537

If we believe what SV CEOs are saying about the scarcity of software developers and the difficulty of hiring, that they are limited by supply and not demand, then I'd expect that Apple is dedicating more of the limited resources to iOS, and OS X will continue to suffer. I think iOS is responsible for much more of their business and I don't see that changing.

Yeah. It looks like iPhone/iPad sales make up about 80% of revenue while Mac sales make up about 10%.

http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2015/01/piechart115.jpg

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#539
Apple has never had quality software aside from the OS. (Ok Safari is pretty good too.) Ultimately it boils down to, too many khaki + button up wearing MBA white dude types, only 1 Steve Jobs. (Sadly seems Jony Ive is not a replacement.) Their culture is antithetical to hiring good people, and without a slave driver to instill fear (Jobs), no one cares about quality.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#540

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 think you've touched on something key: people's acceptance of bugs is often outweighed by the new features they get. In other words, if the "new functionality" is perceived to outweigh the costs of the lack of reliability, the product will be deemed "less buggy" because people "understand" why there are issues. This made total sense in some of Apple's biggest products: OS X and iPhone. When OS X first came out it c…

As a long-time Apple user and former employee, this is exactly how I feel about the current situation. I still think that my Mac/Apple devices are more solid than my Android/PC devices, but this is exactly what I'm noticing more regularly.

I forgive most faults that happen because it's almost as if I can forgive them not working all the time since 99% of the time, everything is awesome. On Windows, that same forgiveness manifests itself as me not using my Windows machines as much as my Macs. I still love to use my PCs, but not for anything that I need to rely on the majority of the time.

Now, though, Apple is making changes to things (iPhoto/Aperture were a really great example) where it seems like the change is just to bring parity of some sort to OS X and iOS rather than introducing new features. iPhoto was buggy as hell when they added Faces and Places to it, but I totally forgave that because 99% of the time it was making my life way easier than it was before by detecting faces properly. If it crashes every now and then, it at least saved the data, so I was still better off than I was before the update. I still like Final Cut X (I know, I know... I'm an outlier), but convincing me that a switch like iPhoto/Aperture -> Photos is worthwhile is much harder since there's nothing to distract me away from those issues and I've somehow managed to actively lose features that they convinced me were necessities in the past.

I hope this is not an indicator of things to come. One thing that gives me some hope is that they've gone back to alternating between feature updates and stability updates. Leopard was cool, but Snow Leopard was incredible to me. If that pace comes back, I'll be happy again. Until then, Apple needs to get their software game back in line with the rest of the company.

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