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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#621

Post by vonklaus »

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…

wow, I couldn't put my finger on it, but this is why I am starting to hate apple. I spend a lot of time on the computer so I like a lot of things apple does, mostly the interface and the UI. To clarify what UI means to me, it is how simple and intuitive it is to use the device, and give it the instructions to do what I want. I am willing to forgive a lot because this is good.

Apple has always been a fairly closed system and it didn't bother me more than not having the features I wanted. In El Capitan, it was different. Things didn't work well and Apple took over my whole system. With SIP(system integrity protection) I had no control. It would seem to turn protection back on after being disabled, and it takes a nontrivial amount of time to turn it off because you have to reboot the entire system into recovery mode, wait for it to connect to the internet and download a bunch of apple shit, and then select a language preference and then type a command into bash and reboot.

Deleting apps is difficult, changing settings is difficult, having siri take up 10% of my iphone is annoying, removing apps destabalize the system, installing my system from time machine reinstalls their system and settings and overrides mine.

I disabled most of apples applications and processes, the system in fairly stable, although I think I went to far with disabling notification center, but your point is correct.

tl;dr users are willing to accept a lot for revolutionary changes. Evolutionary changes with only marginal improvements are not going to make me forget that they unpredictably disallow me from using sudo and are fucking up all my devices doing things I don't want them doing in the first place.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#622

Post by iamcreasy »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #436
digi_owl wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them. Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement. The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software. If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already throw…

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 :)

I had to pay $100 extra for the Windows license that came with my Lenovo Ideapad.

And Lenovo wouldn't let me buy their laptop without the windows license.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#623

Post by vl »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #555
baudehlo wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually NT 3.51, which I used for dev and was great compared to my colleagues on plain windows.

Actually NT 3.1. 3.5 followed, then 3.51, then 4.0, then 5.0 (2000), and then the NT line ended as it was unified with the non-NT line.

Technically 9x line ended since Windows XP was NT-based and not 9x-based.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#624

Post by pjmlp »

st3v3r wrote: post #498
pjmlp wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I develop on Windows and don't see the value on such examples. Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices. There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far. I will become productive with Android Studio the day they are able to match what I already had with Ant, ndk-build and Eclipse ADT/CDT in terms of IDE/build performance and C++ support. Keyboard shortcuts are the least…

"Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices." Genymotion is miles and miles ahead of HAXM. Real Devices are best, though. But using real devices is much easier on OS X, due to not having to even think about drivers. I had to use Windows at a big corporate gig for a while, and that was one of the absolute worst parts of it: drivers. "There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git…

The type of enterprise customers we have just don't go adding projects if they aren't approved by legal and IT departments.

Usually the projects are SDK only.

My current customer is using subversion and the third party projects, if any, use the internal Maven repository or vendoring for the C++ libraries.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#625

Post by peterburkimsher »

In iTunes 10.7 with iOS 6.1.3, it is possible to sync Safari bookmarks, contacts, calendars, photos, and music over USB. I don't always have Internet access, particularly when on a plane.

Notes sync was broken between 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion. Now it won't sync without iCloud.

To downgrade iTunes 11 to 10 on Mavericks 10.9, I had to replace some system libraries. That broke the Mac App Store. I use a friend's laptop to get binaries of apps that they download that are only on the App Store (e.g. Shazam, LINE).

If Apple fixes USB sync, I might force myself to get over the new GUI (which is awful - no track name & artist on the iTunes MiniPlayer?).

If Linux developers get USB sync to work reliably, and make some UI scripting tool similar to AppleScript, then I would consider switching.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#626

Post by alextgordon »

herbturbo wrote: post #437
coldtea wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things. OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows vers…

> The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language). Xcode 3/4 were a lot harder to work with (IB and Instruments separate, had to use Clang on command line etc), but I don't recall them being particularly buggy. Xcode 7 with Swift is the buggiest version I have used. It crashes on me 10+ times a day…

Xcode 3's code completion made everything run so slowly that I had to turn it off, and for a while I just copied and pasted method names out of the Cocoa header files.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#627

Post by ninkendo »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #438
coldtea wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7 So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted. A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of iss…

I'll take a crack at that: - UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond. - Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab,…

Just a quick nitpick: discoveryd was reverted on the last release... OSX is back using mDNSResponder again. You can't really say "It amazes me that such bugs stick around" if you're not actually on the newest version.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#628

Post by pekk »

vonklaus wrote: post #621
tolmasky wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wow, I couldn't put my finger on it, but this is why I am starting to hate apple. I spend a lot of time on the computer so I like a lot of things apple does, mostly the interface and the UI. To clarify what UI means to me, it is how simple and intuitive it is to use the device, and give it the instructions to do what I want. I am willing to forgive a lot because this is good. Apple has always been a fairly closed sys…

A lot of people in this thread seem to think this is all about Apple not adding enough revolutionary features or something. But consider this alternate explanation: with years of experience comes a more sophisticated judgement. What used to seem good enough now seems to have obvious flaws, even if it the same as it was before. Lack of control is an example: beginners often don't notice or care much, especially if it feels simpler, but as your needs deepen it becomes more important. Being able to set things up and then not keep touching it is one of those tastes that develop with experience.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#629

Post by tempestn »

timdeneau wrote: post #217
tajen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accelerated growth and capex. I once saw a very nice chart about the number of users for a great, cool start-up everyone knows about. The CEO illustrated: "You see that inflexion point on the release day? That's what happens for every release. If we postpone it by 3 months, we not only lose 3 months of new customers (painting the 3-months area between lower and higher sales). We also miss on the offset." and he paint…

But their growth primarily comes from hardware, how much would OS X updates influence that growth? Their hardware from 2008 is running El Capitan, so there isn’t much persuasion for existing customers to upgrade. It seems like if someone is going to switch to Mac, they would do it regardless of any features introduced in the last 3-4 OS X releases. I don’t know, I’m not a sales guy. But it seems like the tradeoff of…

Are they really losing a significant percentage of their customer base due to unreliable software though? I doubt it. I expect that most people who use OS X and care about bugs probably have a negative perception of Windows (whether that's still warranted or not). So that leaves Linux. And as good as desktop Linux has become, it's still not the OS for people who don't want to spend time dealing with strange computer issues. So what's left to switch to?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#630

Post by PhantomGremlin »

dkonofalski wrote: post #550
Kalium wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the initial Windows release of Safari. Apple insisted on doing their own font rendering, and the result was blurry headache-inducing text.

Wasn't that a Windows issue, though? I feel like font-rendering on Windows, in general, is far inferior to font-rendering and aliasing on the Mac. Especially with the new HiDPI displays popping up, Apple's stuff looks far better to me than any display I've ever seen on Windows.

font-rendering on Windows, in general, is far inferior to font-rendering and aliasing on the Mac

That's because Windows has to deal with so many more differences in hardware. E.g. look at these pixel-level variations in LCD screens. http://www.digitalversus.com/tv-television/screen-technology... I don't understand how it would be possible to support subpixel rendering on some of those. IIRC when I last used Windows (XP?) it let you choose from 8 different schemes. But that still wouldn't nearly be enough!

OS X and IOS can be tweaked to support a much smaller subset of that mess.

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