Apple’s declining software quality • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#571

Post by slgeorge » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 1:40 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #184

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu has been doing the same thing as Apple with their new UI, trying to jump in on the tablet bandwagon, with this belief that tablets are the future. This is fairly stupid, considering that Ubuntu's marketshare was pretty much 100% PC, 0% tablets. They gave their main demographic a slap in the face, and they never really did acquire any tablet market. Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian…

Immaturity leading to think that following market trends instead of believing in (and even 'still understanding') you're own quality, will be the only way to sustain your business. Jitter.

Every business (and I'd argue project) needs to grow and change with how the world is developing. The Palm Pilot software was perfectly fine in 2004(?) but wouldn't stand a chance serving users-needs in 2016.

The Linux distro's actually serve multiple 'customer' segments. On the client side there are at least two customers (at a minimum), one is end-users, the other is the OEM's who pay for Linux to be preloaded. The traditional OEM's need a solution to the PC market shrinking while the devices market has eaten their lunch.

It's true you have to determine the difference between a short-term 'trend' and a long-term shift. I'm sure you don't think that the mobile market is a short-term 'trend'.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#572

Post by randomacct44 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 1:42 AM UTC

gherkin0 wrote: post #395

bsbechtel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with. I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.

> I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. I'd say they need to fix the features they've implemented, and only release new features when they're fully cooked. Removing features is terrible : it is not an improvement to me when my stuff breaks or when I'm forced into a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator use-case.

It's funny -- on the one hand, people SAY they want this (only fully cooked new features). Yet everyone is really quick to jump up and down and complain and bash $company for lacking innovation when their new OS or the next version of their software comes out and the focus has been on stability/bug fixes.

Not just Wall-Street types either; I see this primarily from tech people. Examples: Android M, OS X Snow Leopard (I think, I may have that release wrong but there was one there that was definitely 'not many new features'), basically anything where the next version isn't predominantly new shiny.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#573

Post by tbyehl » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #459

tbyehl wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| You clearly never used iTunes for Windows. IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.

It's worse on Windows. The Windows version would hash file names or something. Probably to get the search features working. So once you imported your files you didn't know what was what. The Mac version probably just uses spotlight and file names were always readable.

My iTunes library has made several round-trips across platforms and I've never encountered anything like that. My music, apps, books, and podcast files all have consistent, readable naming schemes.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#574

Post by Outdoorsman » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 1:46 AM UTC

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,…

One possible answer is that near-perfection (the perception of "Job's" products), including recognition (widespread adoption), is attainable at any given moment in time, but typically unsustainable long-term...given human and technological constraints...

It could be entropy, as some have suggested, or simply the difficulty of maintaining a level of quality one has become associated with producing...

Maintaining the (high) level of quality one has reached is difficult enough...

Incremental gains on a level attained become much more difficult...opportunities become infinitesimally smaller...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#575

Post by slgeorge » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 1:46 AM UTC

autoreleasepool wrote: post #146

For a desktop OS, what's the alternative? Windows 10? Ubuntu? I've used both recently and neither felt like a step up from OS X.

On the Ubuntu side it really comes down to what you want from your operating system. If your desktop is primarily for development, and you want to be in control of your environment then it's viable. I say that as someone whose been using Linux since 2000 though ;-)

I consume all the walled garden media stuff through Android and iOS - they're devices like my fridge. My desktop is the centre of my creative world, I don't want someone telling me how to do it there. And yes, I'm willing to trade-off my own time to obtain that control.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#576

Post by HillaryBriss » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 1:52 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #42

garyrob wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I won't write a list of the problems in detail, but I've been a Mac user since the 80's because I've always preferred Apple's elegant design and ease of use. But lately, it's hard to figure out how to do things, and it's very buggy. Both I and my son have had to reset our phones to fix problems. It looks like my wife will have to reset hers to deal with a problem with music synchronization. And the design as…

Good UIs have discoverability, but increasingly the software has - whatever the opposite of discoverability is. Simple example: Mail tries to guess settings for you. If you don't want it to do this - it regularly gets them wrong - you have to uncheck a box in the Advanced tab for every account you have. (Because obviously, that's where you're going to look.) Then, instead of making the change, you have to click any o…

> ... whatever the opposite of discoverability is

I suggest "obscuratationalism"

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#577

Post by anonbanker » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 2:05 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #569

anonbanker wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And what IDE on Linux handles all those, without installing 30+ plugins?

Certainly not Visual Studio. Maybe it'll be taken seriously again if it were ported to the platforms where development is happening nowadays.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#578

Post by KirinDave » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 2:09 AM UTC

hga wrote: post #479

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…

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.

What's interesting about this is that it appears they did! Very very early SB models exist and tested MUCH better than the first run of production hardware. You can find a lot of early reviews that praise the battery life, etc.

Then the first wave of consumer-facing SBs went out and it was a total disaster. This might be something that Microsoft can fix, because they have dramatically improved the product experience and been very receptive to trading defective hardware. Mine was traded up the instant they looked at it, with apologies and a customer care call.

> 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.

Did you say the same thing when Apple shipped a massive defect rate on their first gen retina macbooks? Because they DID test thouse, and they still ended up shipping a truly phenomenal number of lemon screens with huge defect and failure rates.

Oh, and Apple refused to replace all but the most egregious failures. I still have a machine with such significant ghosting that it can be difficult to use. Ironically, DaringFireball is actually unreadable. I keep this machine around because it was part of a very special segment of my life, but also because I like showing people, "Yes even Apple's legendary hardware is rife with first gen bugs, and your iPhones and hypothetical new macbooks are no different."

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#579

Post by KirinDave » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 2:09 AM UTC

melted wrote: post #489

hga wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. That's likely why there are no Skylake MacBook yet.

The fact that Skylake was totally out of cycle with Apple's usual release efforts might have something to do with it. MS was in an unusual position.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#580

Post by mamcx » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 2:13 AM UTC

petra wrote: post #225

mamcx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Everything is more complex. Web apps is each iteration harder.. Native App development too (for example, .NET xaml is far harder than winforms and it than VB/Delphi).

And most of this is unnecessary complexity.why haven't anybody came up with better tools to attack that ?

Because is harder to develop for developers.

I'm dreaming to revive the kind of development made famous by FoxPro/dbase (or more exactly, mix Acces+Excel+Databases).

Form building is another area that is far more complex that it need to be. The problem now is the multi-platform: Everyone (or most) want it, but not good toolkit exist to work on...