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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#531

Post by alpinisme »

FabHK wrote: post #486
_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…

FWIW, I've had the expiry month of credit cards stored in Safari increment on occasion (leading to failed online payments, trouble getting a flight, etc.) several times, to the extent that I now always include the expiry month in the card nickname. Mind boggling.

I thought I must have misentered it once and it’s always stuck on that but now you’ve got me thinking

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#532

Post by benwaffle »

dsego wrote: post #279
legitster wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.

It was the first good trackpad that supported gestures that are now common, things like two finger swipe to scroll (inertial scrolling was huge), pinching, two-finger for right click. I still see people using windows laptops with a mouse plugged in because in general windows laptops have touchpads that suck, and it was way more common a decade ago. Innovation in the windows laptop space was adding unusable gimmicks l…

some windows laptops have a haptic touchpad from sensel, which is reportedly good

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#533

Post by wyager »

All software development is ultimately dominated by complexity management asymptotics.

Every tuple of

    (engineers, organizational structure, choice of language, ...)
Generates a function mapping from to

The asymptotic behavior of this function determines the most complex problems you can solve before the complexity of your solution (the software) blows up and becomes unmanageable.

Apple's function currently has subpar asymptotics on the software side, so they've hit the bounds of complexity that they can properly handle.

There are a lot of things you can do to improve your asymptotics: engineering org structure improvements, switch to programming languages with better complexity function asymptotics, etc. etc., but any of these changes require an organization with the executive function and insight to actually make the jump, which is by no means a given.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#534

Post by a-dub »

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…

KDE 6.3 is pretty great these days.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#535

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

I don't disagree, but the average business user is someone who uses the M365 suite and a handful of webapps. We are getting ready to roll it out and our test users haven't had many complaints. IT is a different story, however, for the reasons you stated. It's like they just shuffled all the system and config menus for fun.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#536

Post by VirusNewbie »

markus_zhang wrote: post #393
laweijfmvo wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of us that would love to just sit and fix things all day, but then you get a poor performance review for not shipping new features and find yourself out of a job :)

I wonder how can I join MSFT or Apple just to fix stuffs? Don't care about salary as long as it's on par with my current one.

If you got hired on as an L4, didn’t mind missing out on promotions, and were ok working with your manager it could definitely work.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#537

Post by agumonkey »

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…

"in the beginning was the command line"

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#538

Post by grishka »

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…

All of these modern "declarative" frameworks seem to be optimized for hello world kinds of apps. Jetpack Compose, too.

And SwiftUI is just being too smart sometimes: https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/

Not sure about other people, but for me, my UI framework making its own heuristic decisions about how to lay out and style my views is the last thing I want. It robs me of the certainty that my UI will look and work the way I intend. And this is why, as an Android developer, I still build my apps with decade-old tried and true technologies.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#539

Post by thrdbndndn »

genewitch wrote: post #519
thrdbndndn wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Context menu alone takes a few hundreds milliseconds to load every time. And then you have the infamous "show more options" to click if you want to do most of things (in my use case).

Open a folder isn't much faster either, there is visible delay. with the current-day hardware there is no reason why this isn't instant.

Compare it with Windows XP or Windows 7, the difference is night and day.

Interaction with OneDrive is horrible too, this is particularly bad because it was fine on Win10. When a folder is syncing it constantly "refreshes" itself which causes you to lose the focus if you're renaming files. This is the single most annoying thing because I do close a doc -> immediately rename it all the time.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#540

Post by kingds »

madeofpalk wrote: post #105
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…

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

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