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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#581

Post by KirinDave »

goalieca wrote: post #531
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.

As an engineer,this is the correct response.

Well as an engineer, I think we all know that manufacturing defects can creep in even after prototypes pass.

It's also the case that it's incredibly hard to test things like battery life, wifi connectivity and the effects of heavy processor workloads in a systematic way. You hope that your vendors do a good job (and I bet Microsoft's contract with Intel involves penalties for these major defects to try and incentivize Intel to handle these).

Look at the first Iphone4. How did they miss something as simple as skin contact causing significant antenna interference? Most of us hit it immediately. The answer: hardware in the real world is really hard.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#582

Post by 13of40 »

tolmasky wrote: post #503
nostrademons wrote: post #391

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…

I think that's an awesome sentiment if you're talking about something like an Arduino, where part of the experience is working around its quirks and limitations. If you've bought a device expecting it to basically be a transparent window into the internet (or your documents, etc.), having to deal with its quirks and limitations can put a really bad taste in your mouth. Especially if you paid top dollar for it.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#583

Post by csours »

shmageggy wrote: post #375
mwfunk wrote: 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…

> Also, "success hides failure". If you're a titanically successful corporation, any internal argument along the lines of "we shouldn't do X anymore, we should do Y instead" can be shot down with "well, look at how successful we were while we were doing X! X must not be so bad after all." It degrades an organization's ability to be reflective and self-critical. See: Kodak.

See also General Motors. Its difficult to remember now, but GM was once an innovator.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#584

Post by nikdaheratik »

Apple has not gotten substantially more buggy IMO, but they've made some questionable UX choices (and put more MSFT like stuff in their OS). Windows has gotten much less buggy but is still doing stupid nonsense that probably started with management. So their software advantage has eroded some, but that's as much MSFT getting less stupid and Apple getting more like MSFT in their approach to stupid nonsense in their OS.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#585

Post by cbsmith »

anonbanker wrote: post #522
cbsmith wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promises about how great things were going to be, really soon now. I tend to characterize the "reality distortion field" as a magician-like talent to focus an audiences attention on a particular subject.

Jobs was taught the RDF by his professor. This means it can be learned. The reader is encouraged to learn how to perform the field, so that they can defend themselves, and others, from its effects. As the villain in the Incredibles said: "When everyone's a superhero, no-one will be."

> Jobs was taught the RDF by his professor.

I didn't know that story. Who was the professor? What was the technique?

> This means it can be learned.

Oh definitely. Magicians learn all their tricks, and they are very useful for anyone performing in front of a crowd.

> The reader is encouraged to learn how to perform the field, so that they can defend themselves, and others, from its effects.

Which reader is that?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#586

Post by jarjoura »

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,…

2 possible causes for this:

1) Apple still develops the OS using waterfall over the year. Entire sweeping changes are made only at x.0 releases that trickle down to teams that have to work around the instability all year long and there's no other approved way to get in significant changes.

2) They keep adding more apps to the core OS image that can only be updated with a full software update now. This makes delivery of quick fix updates near impossible since they have to go through the OS release management teams.

It certainly sells better to have a huge list of changes at WWDC that then become reasons to upgrade, but software delivery has moved on from waterfall, so in that respect Apple's OS teams are behind.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#587

Post by orionblastar »

tolmasky wrote: post #503
nostrademons wrote: post #391

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…

True Apple software has always been buggy, Apple calls it undocumented features.

Apple always makes up for bugs with newer devices with faster CPU and GPU units that make OS code run faster. That means buying a new Apple device to get better performance. The older Apple devices are left out of updates eventually and if they do update to a newer OS version it runs slower.

Apple is driven by an upgrade model to buy a new Apple device every three years or so. In the PC world Windows 7 can still run on old Pentium 4 systems and if I am not mistaken some of them can upgrade to Windows 19, the 32 bit version but it can still work. For example I used to have a Macbook that only ran up to 10.7 and 10.8 needed a newer Intel CPU to install. Anyone with an iPhone 4 is going to find the latest iOS slow as well.

It is in Apple's business model to sell customers a new device every few years or so and phase out old Apple devices.

Apple doesn't care if their software isn't the best quality as long as it is easy to use and will keep people buying new Apple devices to run things faster.

I myself like GNU/Linux better than OSX, because it can run on older PC systems and it runs quite fast and has a good quality to it. GNU/Linux is virtually unknown to the average consumer and when people get tired of Microsoft they usually just buy an Apple device. Apple devices are easier to maintain and use. You even got toddlers using iPads, that is how easy they are to learn to use.

Apple has saved up billions just in case they have problems. Apple has done well financially in an uncertain economy where other companies are struggling.

Only Alphabet seems to be doing better for some reason. Google's parent company. Google's Android needs better quality as well and since Oracle sued them over the Java API they have to change the way the OS works. The Web Services seem to earn a lot of money and Google's AI is very advanced.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#588

Post by nikdaheratik »

FireBeyond wrote: post #566
coldtea wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. The transparency is an abomination. Well, those are not software quality issues. Some of those are design decisions, and have been with us forever, not random accidents: "Cut", for example, has never been on the Mac…

""Cut", for example, has never been on the Mac. " Apple Notes would like a word with you. Specifically the word 'Cut' under the Edit menu. Apple Calendar would also like the word with you. Terminal. Script Editor. Not sure how you come to some conclusion that Cut is not "on the Mac". My Apple devices regularly need me to switch WiFi off and on, in my home which has an Airport Extreme and Express, both with latest fir…

In context, they mean "cut" as a way to move a file from one place to another, not related to text which seems to be what you are talking about.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#589

Post by x0 »

jsz0 wrote: post #360
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #198

I use OSX as a glorified terminal and the odd game. Unfortunately it's not a great gaming machine, and it's a horrible terminal. Out of the box, OpenSSL and OpenSSH are shipped broken and insecure, and I'm not sure how anyone could seriously use Safari. Games often come late or don't work as well as their PC counterparts and sometimes require remapping joystick buttons with a third (fourth?) party application. So by…

> I'm not sure how anyone could seriously use Safari. I seriously use Safari everyday. Works fine for me. In my experience it's noticeably faster, more stable, and more battery friendly than Chrome.

I want to use Safari but I just cannot deal with having no favicons.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#590

Post by orionblastar »

bluedino wrote: post #414
nostrademons wrote: post #391

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…

>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio... Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that). I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers…

Apple merging MacOS with NextOS to make a Unix OS was the best move they could make at the time. It happened during the time of the $10,000 Unix workstation and Apple made OSX as an easier to use Unix. It was cheaper to buy a Macintosh than it was to buy a SparcStation or some other Unix workstation.

Because of Apple making OSX Unix based, it cut into sales of other Unix companies like SGI, and also GNU/Linux cut into sales of SGI and others as well.

But making OSX Unix based solved a lot of problems that Classic MacOS had that they couldn't solve.

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