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Apple’s declining software quality

sudophilosophical.com

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#641

Post by lostlogin »

drauh wrote: post #617
marincounty wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go places on my Windows pc that I wouldn't dare take my Mac. I expect it to need repair. My pc is my beater car, and it needs repair--regularly. My Mac is the classic car in the garage, that only gets used for work, or safe places.

Speak for yourself. I used an old G4 PowerBook for grad school, and it travelled over 100,000 air miles, and into the various labs where I had to work, and also to far-off Asian countries for holiday. Plus, I didn't have to buy a developer kit: it came free with the machine.

I assumed that the travel referred to dangerous parts of the web.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#642

Post by arrrg »

rconti wrote: post #607
arrrg wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I think you could say a lot of similar things about iPhoto. That was one shitty app, certainly much, much, much, much more shitty than Photos … There are always many things “wrong” (in your case it’s mostly your specific use case and the place you are coming from, basically mostly your own preferences and biases?) with something, always, always, it’s impossible to avoid. Can’t design for everyone, just can’t. PS:…

iPhoto was pretty bad, but it seems better than Photos. Perhaps I'm just more used to it. Thanks for the tip about the hearts, but I didn't mean in the title bar of the program, I meant overlaid on the photo itself -- the old flagging method was much easier to see at a glance. I actually like the photostream. It's an easy way of getting recent phone snapshots onto my computer for exporting or doing whatever I want --…

You can display hearts on the photos by going to the view menu! (As well as titles if they exist, the file format, …) That info is overlaid!

(I also think it’s entirely reasonable to only have the thumbnail bar for photo navigation. I think the one in iPhoto worked exactly the same? It just maybe wasn’t displayed by default? If you give it all the functionality of all the other views there are consequences to that, knock on effects. For example, which image should be displayed enlarged if you select more than one in the bar? Keeping it simple keeps it simple.)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#643

Post by chris_wot »

dkonofalski wrote: post #540
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…

As a long-time Apple user and former employee, this is exactly how I feel about the current situation. I still think that my Mac/Apple devices are more solid than my Android/PC devices, but this is exactly what I'm noticing more regularly. I forgive most faults that happen because it's almost as if I can forgive them not working all the time since 99% of the time, everything is awesome. On Windows, that same forgiven…

If you think that it was bad when they removed features from iPhoto, then I'd hate to think what you thought when they removed features from Numbers!

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#644

Post by chris_wot »

vonklaus wrote: post #634
pekk wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

that is a good point as well. I definitely agree with it. The one thing I would add is that I repeatedly get update notifications on my iPhone. Due to the increase in lockdown of all features, I am legitimately afraid to update as the: * provides security update * increases iTunes performance type descriptors, do not provide enough information about how they will fundamentally change my system. Most notably when I up…

I'm also concerned about updates. For instance, I'm currrently having to route all my iPad web traffic via Charles proxy to remove any instances of style="overflow:hidden;" in a body tag are cleared out.

Why? Because in iOS 9.2 Apple released it with a bug that causes the viewport to zoom incorrectly on these web pages. This affects LibreOffice's OpenGrok, which I browsed regularly on my iPad.

They still haven't fixed this, and it's a major regression. iOS updates are few and infrequent. Consequently I'm seriously questioning what their updates actually do to my iPad and iPhone.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#645

Post by willyt »

V-2 wrote: post #468
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.

That's right, the anti-aliasing didn't look good to me either. I'm sure it comes out very nicely in print.

That's interesting because 'back in the day' the IT department accidentally installed safari on my win XP box and as a long time mac user I thought 'finally some font rendering done right'. I guess it's down to taste or it perhaps it didn't work well for screens with low pixel density or people who like really small text and ui settings.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#646

Post by eonwe »

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…

To give you a counter-anecdote, I use macbooks in work. For the last five years, I've had two hardware failures and gray screens maybe once every four months. In addition to that, I have issues maybe once a month where the machine more or less locks up (from the logs it looks like windowserver/loginwindow has crashed and OS X is trying to do spindump to them).

Compare that with the _desktop_ Windows 7 machine. It first crashed intermittently (memory failures), but after I changed the motherboard, it has not crashed at all. But then again, I am not using, for example, the most cutting-edge graphic drivers.

I remember quite some crashes during the Windows XP times, but I've since taken a more conservative approach to hardware and drivers.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#647

Post by bborud »

nostrademons wrote: post #391
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,…

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…

We have two different theories here. We're smart people, right? We should be able to figure out if we just percieve software quality to be worse or if it really is.

So how do we measure this in some valid manner?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#648

Post by collyw »

jarjoura wrote: post #586
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…

I would be skeptical about agile on something like OS development which is on a different scale from your average software project.

Not saying it won't work, but I would like to see some comparisons of OS level projects that have gone agile and compare it to the waterfall approach.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#649

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

vl wrote: post #623
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I suppose so. I didn't want to say the 9x line ended, because it's really the line of DOS-based OSes, and while the NT line is ongoing, it's no longer called NT. 2000 was the last version to mention NT, and it wasn't part of the name itself, just a tagline.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#650

Post by nextos »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137
nextos wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat. A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So i…

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…

If you want something reliable you may want to put some time into installing a minimal Linux or BSD and creating a simple setup.

I have been running Arch for 7 years before switching to NixOS. I found using no desktop environment, just a tiling window manager and only text-mode software (except firefox and a document viewer) incredibly robust. So few moving parts I never had a major hiccup.

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