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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#641

Post by jamil7 »

epaga wrote: post #635

Here's what I find most puzzling about these things: Apple does amazingly helpful WWDC sessions on how to profile and improve your code, how to prioritize performance...but when it comes to their own apps, it's like they forget everything they know? Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even ski…

There's always been a lot of room for them to optimise performance on macOS to a level that they do iOS, but modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it. Then the elephant in the room is SwiftUI itself, there's a performance cliff there, wherein if you've optimised everything else, you might just hit the brick wall that's the layout engine with no recourse or ability to even peak under the hood. We're at a point now where building a fully native macOS app, with the first-party toolchain, will give you far worse performance (in terms of responsiveness not resource usage) than something like Electron. I have a suspicion teams inside of Apple are also running up against these issues as they start to actually adopt the framework.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#642

Post by bowsamic »

The Apple experience seems very luck based. Sometimes it goes great but if you hit the perfect storm of issues you're just totally out of luck

I also do agree that their modern software is shockingly bad, and it is strange because, as others note, what they offer to third parties is generally quite good so third party applications are often quite amazing. It seems like Apple are unable to develop for themselves

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#643

Post by abhayk13 »

kazinator wrote: post #417

My work Macbook sometimes drops random characters from the lock screen password input. You hit a key and a black dot does not appear; the password is consequently rejected. It's not exactly this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/458099/macos-lock-... The system is not lagging at all. It's not this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/08/29/mac-wont-accept-correct-l... It's a bit like this, but only for the system p…

I always thought this was due to Bluetooth issues or me mistyping the password. Thanks for confirming that this was not the case.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#644

Post by mrWiz »

retrac98 wrote: post #595
Nevermark wrote: post #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…

This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now. Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.

I'm testing out Wiim in a couple rooms as a replacement for Sonos and the initial results have been positive, though I haven't been using them long. So far my biggest complaints are that every model in their lineup has a different protocol compatibility list and that the Spotify integration isn't as well-polished.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#645

Post by pjmlp »

rqtwteye wrote: post #258
progmetaldev wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

I think it's pretty crazy how slow a lot of the newer things in Windows 11 are. Explorer is super slow, Settings are slow. Sometimes I think even if I wanted to make things that slow (without using sleep statements), I wouldn't know how do it.

The answer to that is relatively easy, WinUI 3.0 being shoved into Windows, even though UWP has failed to get adoption, after so many reboots even those of us that were deep into it got pissed off and moved elsewhere, leaving the Windows team as the only group of folks still trying to push it.

Go have a tour on Github for the endless collection of issues, some of them 5 years old, when Project Reunion was announced.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#646

Post by yeison »

diggan wrote: post #127
varenc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Linux CarPlay alternative do you use?

I don't, I still use my horrible iPhone 12 Mini for CarPlay. Waiting for it to either get too old to get updates, or for it to break before I move back to Android, I guess.

So given the choice you still choose CarPlay.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#647

Post by brigade »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #442
karmakaze wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one. BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually…

I think that Apple, perhaps naively, expects display manufacturers to adhere to spec when in reality they often don’t. Either way macOS has no trouble with my 27” 2560x1440 Asus and Alienware monitors. Both connect with 10bit RGB no problem, at least over USB-C and DisplayPort (haven’t tried HDMI).

macOS really wants to do different things for TVs vs monitors, so if it decides your monitor is a TV for whatever reason, it’ll probably prefer YCbCr and also not offer any HiDPI modes except exactly 2x

2560x1440 is a strong indicator of a monitor, but 4k over HDMI tends to get detected as a TV

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#648

Post by yeison »

tbeseda wrote: post #27

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

iTunes was such a piece of garbage. It would literally get stuck in a login loop whenever you tried to open it and it was pretty unintuitive design. Apple Music is not perfect but 100x better than iTunes. However, I never bought Macs for Music. It has always just been the most ideal development machine.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#650

Post by mamonoleechi »

gblargg wrote: post #591

I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been dele…

> why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone?

Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.

On Google Drive, if you run out of space, you can create a new account, and switch when needed.

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