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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#582
iOS 18.3.1 bricked my wifi and bluetooth. Can't connect to anything. MacBook Pro cannot open discord, slack, mail due to an os issue. Apple has such great hardware but the software has so many bugs, you start looking around for alternatives.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#583

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…

Ironically Linux with KDE is very good for being both pixel perfect, responsive and enjoyable to work with.

What a time to be alive.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).

That's preferable to Windows 11 requiring a cloud account in my book.

I installed Windows 11 last year without cloud account.

Maybe because it's Pro version? I don't remember doing any incantation but it's possible that I didn't connect internet during installation.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#586

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default. You are not prompted or asked to enable. After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored. This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality.…

What is even worse is that I have all automatic updates turned off but my mac still auto updates all the time.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#587
I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems:

• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.

• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.

• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.

• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.

• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.

• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.

I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".

To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.

Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#588
I fail to see the quality crisis if you’re just sticking with iPhone and Mac.

I’ve yet to find a better phone+computer setup if what you’re looking for are good quality native apps, integration between pc and handset, and a usable Unix environment for programming and other work.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#590

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who…

Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.

I have the occasional annoyance like "VLC has choppy audio for a few seconds after I seek," and "Gnome has gone full douchebag with notifications for everything and removing all the settings."

Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.

IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...

After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.

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